Best Apps for Schools 2023: For Teachers and Students
Apps in schools can help students stay engaged and motivated throughout the long school year by providing interactive and collaborative learning experiences. Schools are increasingly recognizing the potential of tablets and smartphones to enhance classroom learning.
This resource provides teachers with a comprehensive overview of the best apps to integrate in their classrooms, from apps that support creative writing and collaboration to flipped classroom tools and teacher favorites.
Many publishers have created high-quality apps for schools and their communities. These school apps offer a variety of features that help schools communicate effectively with parents and improve student engagement.
We have compiled a list of the most useful educational apps for teachers, students and educators, proven to save time and increase productivity.
Feeling overwhelmed trying to choose the right education apps to support what you’re doing in the classroom? See below a list of apps for schools that can help teachers to engage with the students in the classroom.
Kahoot
Teachers use the game based platform for learning. Kahoot allows educators to be creative and students to be motivated. Kahoot is a digital game-based student response system that allows teachers and learners in classroom settings to interact through competitive knowledge games. Kahoot’s audio and music features affected classroom dynamics in a significant and positive manner. Kahoot! makes it easy for teachers to gamify their online classes. For every academic challenge, this app for an easier school life should be at the top of your list.
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Devices: iPhone, iPad and Android
Smart Tales is a rich library of interactive stories and animations that teaches STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) to students. Smart Tales offers students the opportunity to grow their problem solving skills, critical thinking and understanding of science, all in a fun and interactive way.
Each Smart Tale contains many animated and interactive storybook pages. Children, led by a voiceover, can interact with the animations with a single touch and discover a world filled with magic and fun. The storytelling is dotted with games that change every time they are played. This always lets kids enjoy the stories in an active way.
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Devices: iPhone, iPad and Android
Spelling Games : Times Tables is a homework support tool for helping kids to manage and practice the spelling lists given to them by their teachers. It includes built-in word lists to practice and makes it easy to import custom word lists. The app also has helpful arithmetic practice tools.
Spelling Bee and Times Tables app also provides timed test for multiplication, addition and subtraction. Spelling Words app makes it easy to keep track of your student's progress.
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Devices: iPhone, iPad and Android
Skool Loop is a communication app that helps schools, parents, and students stay connected. It provides a central place for schools to share information, such as news, events, and announcements. Parents can use Skool Loop to stay up-to-date on their child's progress, and students can use it to communicate with their teachers and classmates.
Skool Loop offers a variety of features, including: School news and events, Parent-teacher communication, Student-teacher communication, Calendar, Attendance, Permission slips, Messaging.
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Devices: Skool Loop is available in both a web app and a mobile app. The web app can be accessed from any computer, and the mobile app is available for iOS and Android devices.
CoSpaces Edu lets teacher and students create their own interactive learning content. It offers tools for 3D and virtual tour creation, quizzes, coding and managing classes, as well as resources for digital and remote learning.
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Devices: CoSpaces Edu is available in both a web app and a mobile app. The web app can be accessed from any computer, and the mobile app is available for iOS and Android devices.
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Book Creator is an amazingly easy-to-use tool for making multimedia digital books. This app is accessible even to kids in early elementary school grades to produce and publish their own simple books or comics with images, videos, and audio. Readers can access published books via iBooks or other online sources, or books can be printed on paper.
You can create and share engaging teaching and learning resources to support lessons across all key learning areas. The app support students to create a polished digital text from their written work, using a range of creative features to enhance their creations.
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Book Creator works on iOS and Android devices but everything else with a browser, too, including PCs, Macs, and Chromebooks.
Google Classroom makes teaching more productive and meaningful by streamlining assignments, boosting collaboration, and fostering communication. Educators can create classes, distribute assignments, send feedback, and see everything in one place. This classroom app also seamlessly integrates with other Google tools like Google Docs and Drive. Google Classroom serves as a perfect companion for both teachers & students.
You can access Classroom using the web on a computer with any browser, such as Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari. In general, Classroom supports major browser releases on a continual basis. Google Classroom app is also available for Android and Apple iOS mobile devices.
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ANTON is a free learning app with a complete all-in-one curriculum for all subjects: reading and writing, math, science, languages and music for kindergarten to grade 5.
Boasting over 50,000 exercises it contains interactive elements, feedback, games and explanations all aimed at supporting young people to learn.
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Devices: Available on iPhone, iPad and Android.
Additio - Teacher grade book is a powerful classroom management application that provides a simple way to manage your classes, organize lessons and collaborate with peers. The application provides a lesson planner, student grading, classroom seating plans, student profiles, reports, student attendance, timetables, calendars and so much more.
Additio - Teacher grade book is used on a daily basis by more than 100,000 teachers in more than 20,000 schools and universities in over 110 countries.
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Devices: Available on iPhone, iPad and Android.
Writelike is a platform designed to help students develop advanced creative and narrative writing skills. Teachers can use this application with the students who struggle to write fluently in the major school genres.
Writelike can help your students develop advance writing skills by modelling great writers. With Writelike, the goal is to provide high quality lessons that teachers can use to build a solid foundation in all students, so they have more time to work on higher-order, higher-value instruction.
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Devices: Available on all browsers.
Klassly is a digital classroom geared toward elementary school grades that's accessible by mobile device and the web. The user experience looks much like a typical social networking platform, and the focus is on providing a space for teachers and parents to share and communicate. Bridging the gap between school and home can help student outcomes, and Klassly can certainly help with that.
Use Klassly to create open lines of communication with parents, show off what's going on in the classroom, organize activities, and assign and track homework.
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Devices: Available on iPhone, iPad and Android.
Instant Aid is a first aid guide app ideal for school staff trained as first responders. The app's concise and clear content, supported by quizzes, helps its users keep first aid knowledge fresh. In an emergency, the app provides step-by-step guidance to trained first responders to remind them of best practices and help them follow the correct steps.
It provides a great tool for revising what to do and an intuitive reference guide to prompt and support first aiders during a real-life first aid incident.
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Devices: Available on iPhone, iPad and Android.
DiaryZapp for Schools is a daily journaling app, designed to help children develop positive mental health and emotional wellbeing habits. DiaryZapp for Schools provides a creative safe space for children, where there are no wrong answers, allowing them to reflect on their day and process their emotions. Speech to text functionality allows children to talk about their day and create a journal page without writing.
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Devices: Available on iPhone, iPad and Android.
Remind is a easy and simple communication app for teachers to instantly text students and parents outside the classroom. Messages are sent in real time to an entire class, a small group, or just a single person. Teachers can also schedule announcements ahead of time and attach photos and other files. To reach every family, translate your messages into more than 90 languages before you send.
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Devices: The Remind app is available on devices that have access to the App Store (iOS) and the Google Play Store (Android). Blackberries, Chromebooks, Kindles, or Windows phones.
Explain Everything app is one of the easy-to-use and best interactive whiteboard and screencasting app. Explain Everything can be used to present information to students in a visually engaging way. But an even more exciting part of this app is helping your students learn to create and present with it - individually or on group projects.
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Devices: iPhone, iPad and Android
A Bitmoji clasroom is a virtual classroom where educators can deliver content to students in a fun and engaging way. Educators can add a Bitmoji into a virtual classroom to create an animated experience for students. Teachers can even organize images in their own "classroom" so that they hyperlink out to external sources.
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Devices: iPhone, iPad and Android
Spellwizards is a fantastic web based app that aims to help young children in all stages and in all years of primary school to enhance and develop a multitude of literacy based skills such as spelling, typing and listening skills.
The app supports classroom learning for teachers at curriculum and extra curriculum levels.
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Devices: Web Browsers
Animation Kit app is an easy to use, child-friendly platform for creating exciting animation sequences using drawings, photos, shapes and text.
What we love about Animation Kit is the simplicity and ease at which a complex animation can be created in a short space of time. Our users found the application very intuitive and easy to navigate. The app has the potential to be used in many areas of the curriculum such as computer science, art, animation, storyboarding and more.
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Devices: iPad
News-O-Matic is the first daily newspaper just for students. It provides an exciting and engaging nonfiction experience for students, complete with valuable literacy tools for the classroom. Thanks to its unique combination of editorial and technology, News-O-Matic creates innovative solutions to help students become tomorrow’s responsible citizens. It gives young readers a window into the world — and a reason to love reading news.
For teachers and students, there are more classroom-friendly news apps that can give students different perspectives on key current events.
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Devices: iPhone, iPad and Android
ClassDojo is a consistent and very structured classroom management tool designed to help teachers improve student behavior and communicate more effectively with parents. It can be used to a small or large extent depending on your time, purpose, and interest. As part of the behavior management system. the students receive points for specific behaviors (On-task, working hard, persistence, etc.) and receive negative points for negative behaviors such as being off-task, bullying, or blurting out.
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Devices: iPhone, iPad and Android
OnlyOffice is a complete school and business based cloud and on-site document management system. The application is available over a number of platforms and comes in a range of free and subscribed packages. This cloud service is compatible with MS Office formats and comes in at an affordable subscription price compared to others. The application if free from in app adverts and is available in a number of different languages.
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Devices: iPhone, iPad and Android
Nearpod offers teachers an easy-to-use tool for creating interactive lesson plans, presentations, assessments, and digital content. Nearpod allows teachers to create digital lesson plans, share it with students during class, and track individual progress. Lessons are comprised of teacher-created slides that can include text, video, images, websites, questions, quizzes, polls, and assignments. Students are able to follow the lesson on their own devices at their own pace or teachers can lead a synchronized session where students can follow the lesson in real-time.
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Devices: iPhone, iPad and Android
Socrative Teacher is an amazing app to use to assess students in your classroom. The ease of use of Socrative makes it so teachers can gather data and assess their students by simply pressing a button. The teacher app lets you create and run quizzes, general feedback and games. The nice part about Socrative is that exporting the data is a breeze!
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Devices: iPhone, iPad and Android
With the Quizlet app, students can search an online database of more than 13 million user-created flashcard sets on a wide variety of topics. This app is free, and the content varies from highly useful to useless. The app is for reviewing flashcards and students can use it to create their own sets of flashcards.
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Devices: iPhone, iPad and Android
Popplet app can be used to organise thoughts and ideas in visual form using diagrams, charts and mindmaps for elementary to high school students requiring a minimalist approach to presentations. Popplet is an excellent way for students to create graphic organizers to organize and share what they have learned! It is easy to use, allows the user to incorporate images and text, and can be exported to photos to be shared via a website.
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Devices: iPhone, iPad
iMovie is an app that can be used across all age groups in schools. Teachers can also use iMovie as a tool for introducing content in a meaningful way. The presentations created by iMovie are highly distinguished and are ideal for classroom teaching. Both teachers and students can use iMovie to document and record events outside of the school and that has relevance to the units being taught in the classroom. Students can use iMovie to tell stories using digital media including pictures, images, and music. This can improve their verbal fluency and their communicative skills.
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Devices: iPhone, iPad
Mathletics is the world’s leading educational resource for mathematics, created by the team behind the World Education Games. Over 4 million students in schools across the world are a part of our global learning community. Many schools have introduced their students to the competitive thrills provided by Mathletics. If your child’s school is not one of these, you can still let them experience learning and practising maths by competing against children from all over the world.
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Devices: iPhone, iPad and Android
Notability is one of the most versatile apps available for notes taking. You can type or write notes on notebooks and organize them into folders inside the app. However, it also lets you annotate PDFs, which can be great for grading student papers.
Notability also records audio and lets you take notes at the same time. So, you could be having a reading conference with a student, or testing their reading fluency with the audio recorder, while taking notes at the same time on your iPad. One of the primary reasons is because of the workflows that teachers and students can create in order to retrieve, annotate and submit work.
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Devices: iPhone, iPad and Android
Showbie is an assignment submission and grading app for desktop and mobile devices, tuned to flipped and one-to-one computing classrooms. With both its free and paid versions, teachers can create assignments and share them with students, and students can submit responses from a desktop or mobile device.
Teachers can offer written feedback (by drawing or typing) and they can also record audio to give verbal feedback. Notably, Showbie lets students submit assignments from many iPad apps, including apps where students write, draw, develop presentations, and make movies. The paid version of the app has significantly more features, including a gradebook tool, a student portfolio, and additional features for fostering discussion among students and with parents.
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Devices: iPhone, iPad
ShowMe Interactive whiteboard app is an application that allows teachers and students of any age to create presentations called ‘ShowMe’s that can be shared via the device on online privately or to a community audience. The user can record and create engaging voice over presentations of their chosen topic by using some of the many tools such as adding text, drawings, photos and images.
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Devices: iPhone, iPad and Android
Show My Homework has been built around a clear vision of how technology can help everybody in the process of setting and completing homework. It is fully featured for its specific purpose but not bloated with superfluous features. This keeps it simple to use for everybody. Schools that adopt it will need to put a little work in at the start to ensure that it is universally supported and used by staff, parents and students. The reward will be a much more effective use of homework.
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Devices: iPhone, iPad, Android, Web Browsers
ABCya Games provides over 400 fun and educational games for grades PreK through 6. Their activities are designed by parents and educators, who understand that children learn better if they are having fun. Games are categorized by grade and subject, and cover topics such as multiplication, parts of speech, typing, pattern recognition, and more.
Many ABCya games are aligned to the Common Core State Standards. This means your kids can learn the essential skills they need to succeed, in a way that’s playful and fun.
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Devices: iPhone, iPad and Android
Pixton EDU is an interactive platform that gives teachers and students a unique way for creating comic book storyboards using avatars, backgrounds, text and themes to be shared within the classroom.
Users can explore topics in Math, Science, Social Studies, History, English or Art. Choose images from popular content, books and movies like The Hunger Games or The Outsiders, plus other topics like the solar system, black history or the environment – all Common Core aligned.
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Devices: Web Browsers
Mazaam - The Musical Genius is an engaging and animated app for students to develop their understanding of music through a range of games and levels.
You can also see all of the things your student has worked through on the app, how many stars they have achieved, and therefore how much progress they have made across different musical elements such as tempo, pitch, intensity, harmony and timbre. This is really fantastic for adults to be able to identify strengths and weaknesses for their student across the different levels and worlds.
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Devices: iPhone, iPad and Android
Other top picks from our teachers: