12 must-have tools and apps for Australian teachers

Here’s an easy, condensed ‘Top 12’ list that will fit neatly into a folder on anyone’s device.

EP Teacher App
This app from Education Perfect saves teachers time and helps them focus on what’s important. Teachers can use the app to browse and preview content which can then be easily set as homework tasks for their classes. It also allows teachers to manage their students' login credentials, all while on the go. Students can complete a range of fun and engaging curriculum-aligned activities with instant teacher feedback and step-by-step explanations along the way.

Quizziz (available on Android, iO)
This app allows teachers to conduct student-paced formative assessments in a way that’s fun and engaging for students, no matter their age. The questions appear on each student's screen, and can be answered at their own pace, then reviewed at the end. With more than 10 million active users, Quizizz is widely popular and well-reviewed.
 
StudyBlue (Android)
StudyBlue is an online studying platform for high school students, which allows users to upload class study materials, create electronic flashcards to share and study, and practice quizzes. Though free, upgrades of $3–9/month allow custom colors and font features as well as allowing media on the definition side of flashcards. The platform currently has over seven million users.

Viper
The internet has made plagiarising a whole lot easier for students than it was in previous years and Viper makes it easy for teachers to check text for plagiarism. It has been downloaded close to one million times so far. By scanning documents uploaded into its system, Viper notifies users if they detect any of the document’s contents present anywhere on the internet.

Behaviour Flip  
Though relatively new on the education app scene, Behaviour Flip is a sustainable and effective behavior monitoring solution. It effectively tracks and manages student behaviours, and provides high quality social-emotional data to create student snapshots for administrators, instructors, families and students. It tracks classroom and school-wide behaviors, then customises measurable behaviours and interventions to fit the specific purpose. 
 
Classwork
Apple’s Classwork app provides simple integrated workflows which teachers and students can share and collaborate on. Teachers can share content with students even when they are out of the classroom and assign PDFs, links, documents and even activities within an app. By easily viewing class and student progress data, teachers can then use this data to determine how students are faring, and then personalise instruction based on student needs. Assignments and announcements automatically appear on students’ iPads, organised by class and deadline. Students have a single place to find content and instruction, submit work and view their progress.
 
Kahoot
Kahoot is a game-based classroom activity, with questions projected on a shared screen, while players answer the questions with their smartphone, tablet, or computer. The game allows for the design of multiple-choice quizzes as well as polls and surveys that populate on-the-spot data, with quiz questions and polls stimulating quick instructional decisions as well as whole-class discussion. The platform has seen a staggering 1.3 billion active users, and over 100 million games (most created by users themselves).
 
ClassDojo
This platform connects primary school teachers, students and families through communication features, such as a feed for photos and videos from the school day, and messaging that can be translated into more than 35 languages. A recent survey revealed 90 per cent of Australian teachers using the app believed ClassDojo had made their classroom a more positive space. The company says ClassDojo reaches 1% of the roughly 700 million children in grades K-8 (or their equivalent) globally every day, which adds up to more than 10 million kids.
 
Stack the Countries
Through Stack the Countries, students can learn the major distinguishing facts about 193 different countries by using flash cards and games. The app lets students discover and memorise the shapes, capitals, landmarks, major cities, border nations, languages, flags, and home continent of each country. The games use a Tetris-like format requiring players to correctly answer a geography question in order to earn a game piece they then place into a row. The object is to stack up pieces to reach a target height; when the target is reached, players move on to the next level. As a new era way to the geography classroom, it makes fun out of learning about the world.
 
Samsung Global Goals
This is an app to support the United Nations’ work to end the injustice of poverty, inequality, and climate change. The Sustainable Development Goals, known as the Global Goals, is a plan to eliminate hunger, fight inequality, and clean up the planet. The Samsung Global Goals app invites users of Android and Samsung Galaxy devices to get involved through an easy-to-use interface. Clicking through the app, users learn more about the Goals, with key facts, context, examples and stories of how each Goal is relevant on a global and local scale. 
 
Google Classroom
With an estimated 40 to 100 million users, Google’s free web service for schools aims to simplify creating, distributing, and grading assignments. With its primary purpose to streamline the process of sharing files between teachers and students, Google Classroom lets teachers start a video meeting, create and manage classes, assignments, and grades online, add materials to assignments (such as YouTube videos, a Google Forms survey, and other Google Drive items), give feedback in real time, use the class stream to post announcements and engage students in question-driven discussions, and invite parents and guardians to sign up for email summaries with a student's upcoming or missing work.

Compass School Manager
A web-based system accessible on any modern web browser application, and designed for staff, students and parents, Compass School Manager is an online parent portal to connect families, students and teachers for administrative and operative functions of the particular school as well as curriculum, assessment, teaching and learning. View the school news feed, receive messages from the school, view timetables, view the school calendar, view learning tasks, book parent-teacher conferences, add attendance notes, and view academic reports. Every family receives a separate login to Compass, which is provided by the school.

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