11.06.2018
15 Examples of How EdTech and JavaScript are Transforming the Classroom
Technology is changing every part of the education system, from the way teachers plan lessons and administer tests to the way students study and prepare themselves for the future. Using the power of JavaScript, EdTech startups and established companies are creating the kind of apps, online platforms, and communication systems that classrooms just two decades ago couldn’t have dreamed of using.
Here are 15 awesome examples of JavaScript-powered tech tools that are changing the world of education:
Flipgrid
Flipgrid is a video discussion platform used by millions of students and teachers in more than 180 countries. The platform aims to create a social learning environment in which a teacher posts a discussion topic and students respond via video. Crucially, the platform gives students all the same creative video-capture tools they would get with social media, while video moderation and access controls ensure teachers are ultimately in charge.
InsertLearning
InsertLearning is a free Google Chrome Extension that lets teachers turn any page on the internet into a virtual lesson. Created by two high school teachers, the tool allows teachers to insert questions, videos, notes, and insights into the content. It also gives educators and students access to a curated search engine of educational content like textbooks and primary sources. InsertLearning is a Google Classroom Partner, so lessons can be shared with students and other teachers through the Google Classroom platform.
Kidblog
Kidblog gives students a safe place to publish their work and a real audience to write for. While most blogging platforms aren’t recommended for students, Kidblog gives K–12 teachers the moderation tools they need to allow students to safely publish work. Students can create content that is shared with their peers in more than 70 countries.
Legends of Learning
Legends of Learning features more than 1,000 curriculum-aligned games that help elementary and middle school students learn science. While students have all of the fun, teachers are in full control and are able to create a custom playlist of games based on their classroom objectives. Every game is organized into learning objectives spread across three main areas: Life, Earth and Space, and Physical Sciences. Once a playlist has been created, students can play at home or in the classroom while teachers track student progress in real time through embedded quizzes.
Coursera
Coursera offers universal access to the very best in higher education. By partnering with some of the world’s top universities—Stanford, Yale, and Johns Hopkins, to name a few—Coursera provides everything from single courses to accredited online degrees through an immersive online platform. More than 2,700 courses are available online and through mobile apps, and content is taught through video, quizzes, assignments, and final exams. Even though the courses are digital, you aren’t left entirely on your own. The Coursera app enables students to engage in discussion and learn from one another, while also receiving support from dedicated mentors.
Newsela
Newsela is an EdTech startup aiming to transform the way kids learn to read. The platform publishes non-fiction articles every day at five different levels of complexity. This opens the stories up for students from Grade 2 all the way through Grade 12. Embedded quizzes, annotations, and writing prompts all track students’ progress. There is even a Power Words feature that helps students learn grammar and expand their vocabularies by pairing new words with activities to help commit them to memory.
Formative
Used daily for classroom activities, homework, and assessments, Formative allows teachers to accurately track student progress over time. It also gives them at-a-glance access to all the data they need about individual students. Founded by UCLA grad students, the Formative platform was prototyped in the university’s startup program, perfected in the 4.0 Schools incubator, and transformed into the company it is today through the Imagine K12 Accelerator.
Labster
Labster develops fully interactive 3D lab simulations that allow students to access and perform real-life, open-ended experiments in their browsers. There are hundreds of experiments for students to discover across practically every scientific field, and students are free to learn at their own pace. The platform is so robust that it is used by MIT, the University of Florida, and the University of Hong Kong—institutions that actually have the kind of laboratories that the platform recreates.
Trovvit
Trovvit helps students showcase their extracurricular activities. In a sector where so much innovation is focused solely on the classroom, Trovvit offers a refreshing reminder that every aspect of school life can be enhanced by technology. The platform provides students with a private and secure portfolio that lets them share with schools, colleges, and potential employers the things that make them unique. Student portfolios can include achievements, photos, artwork, and more, and they can keep it to themselves as long as they want before they’re ready to share.
Planbook
Planbook helps teachers create, organize, and share their lesson plans. Students and parents can also use the platform to view lesson plans, upcoming assignments, grades, and reports. And because Planbook is available as a web app as well as a mobile app, it can be accessed by teachers and students from anywhere, on any device.
Quizalize
Quizalize lets teachers turn tests into fun games and quizzes. Using the platform itself or Google Classroom, teachers can choose from more than 100,000 quizzes or create their own to deliver an engaging, interactive assessment to their students. The platform doesn’t just make kids want to test more often; it also helps teachers identify which students need the most help and allows for the assignment of tailored follow-up resources, so students can get the help they need to progress.
Blackbullion
Blackbullion teaches college students a valuable lesson that very few schools do—how to properly manage their finances. Educational videos, interactive content, and online tools cover the basics of personal finance and how to prepare for working life. The best part is: There’s no cost to students. Thanks to partnerships with universities in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, BlackBullion is available to students for free. The course is based entirely online and can be accessed from anywhere, on any device.
Showbie
At its core, Showbie is a homework management app that allows work to be assigned, submitted, and graded completely digitally. This is made possible through a suite of options like pen and highlighter tools, voice notes, and class folders. But that’s not all Showbie does. Notifications keep students abreast of deadlines, while teachers can create dedicated groups for parents and colleagues to foster stronger classroom communities. The beauty of Showbie is that this all takes place in a single platform.
Remind
Remind makes unread emails, forgotten handouts, and misplaced teacher reports a thing of the past. This comprehensive, secure classroom communication app transforms the way students, teachers, and parents speak to each other. Two-way communication is enabled through direct messages (that can be translated into more than 70 languages), voice calling, and district-wide bulletins.
Need to notify all your students at once of an upcoming deadline? Remind can do that. Want to make sure parents know what their kids learned today? Remind can do that. Want to speak privately to a particular parent? Remind can do that. And because the app isn’t reliant on any one device, it is accessible to virtually everyone.
Matific
Matific uses interactive content to help children master basic math concepts. Content is fully mapped to curricula and designed to be used repeatedly throughout the early school years—because the platform is specifically built to reinforce already learned concepts as much as it is to teach new ones. Games and lessons are accessible online, with content tailored to each student’s ability. Teachers can track progress in real time and receive automatically-generated reports grouped by curriculum or topic.
If you are passionate about education and dream of developing powerful EdTech tools like the ones you’ve seen here, check out Fullstack Academy, where you can build in just 17 weeks the programming skills you’ll need to change the future of education.
