My Favorite New & Updated Ed Tech Tools in 2019

The end of the year is here and like a lot of bloggers, vloggers, and podcasters I’ve put together an “end of the year” list. This is list contains my choices for best new and updated ed tech tools in 2019. As I wrote when I published this on Free Technology for Teachers last week, this is a highly subjective list but at least I can say that no company paid to appear on this list.

Anchor.fm is the platform that I’m using to produce the Practical Ed Tech Podcast. It makes it super easy to distribute my podcast to all of the major podcasting networks including Google Play and Apple Podcasts.

Slido is a new service that makes it easy to insert interactive quiz and poll questions into your Google Slides presentations.

VidReader will create a transcript of any YouTube video that contains spoken English. Transcripts are both printable and hyperlinked with timestamps.

Canva released a slew of updates to close out 2019. Included in those updates is a new video editor and a new tool for removing the background from any image. Best of all, teachers can get all of the pro features of Canva for free at canva.com/education.

Padlet has been a staple in my menu of tools throughout the decade! This year Padlet added a new multimedia mapping tool.

The web version of Google Earth received from much-needed updates this year including the addition of new geography games. The best update though was the addition of a tool for making multimedia placemarks and tours. The web version of Google Earth still lags behind the desktop version, but it’s improving.

In 2019 Google Slides finally got a native audio feature! Now you can add audio to your slides without having to use any third-party add-ons or weird workarounds.

Canned responses was one of the new features that was added to all Gmail / G Suite email accounts this year. I use this feature a lot when answering questions from students and parents.

Glide Apps just might be my favorite new tool of 2019! With Glide Apps anyone who can make a Google Sheet can make a working mobile app. It has been a hit everywhere that I’ve demonstrated it this year. Glide Apps is one of the tools that I’m featuring in my updated Teaching History With Technology course starting in January.

ClassTools has been on my go-to list of resources throughout the last decade. In 2019 ClassTools added some new game templates and an interactive image generator template.

Educandy is a new game creation service that appeared on my radar this year. My blog post about it proved to be one of the most popular of the year.

BoClips is an educational video service that I discovered back in January. It offers millions of educational videos without all of the distractions typically associated with YouTube yet contains content licensed from some of the most popular educational channels on YouTube.

Last, but not least, Microsoft’s Immersive Reader tool is making more tools and resources accessible to more students than ever before. Immersive Reader has been integrated into dozens of tools from Microsoft and third-party services. Immersive Reader provides read-aloud functions as well as other reading supports like font spacing and enlargement, line focus, and syllable highlighting.

You can learn more about all of these tools and find tutorials on how to use them on my YouTube channel.