Professional Development Apps, Tools, and Resources That We Love
Are you looking for professional development apps, tools, and resources that you can use to make you a better educator? If so, we have you covered. Check out our list below. Let us know if there are any that we missed.
CampusCE Education Management – This is a platform designed to provide infrastructure automation for educational communities using web-based applications to link administrators, faculty, and students. It is useful for community and vocational colleges, continuing and community education, professional development, workforce training, corporate universities, and government.
CourseStage – CourseStage is a mobile-responsive learning management system (LMS) designed to support professional development initiatives. This software has a built-in quiz engine that allows users to make data-driven decisions. The interface is designed for personal and business branding that supports e-learning with options to store current and future learning experiences.
Discovery Education – Discovery Education is a big player in EdTech. The company has established itself as the leading provider of digital curriculum resources, digital content, and professional development for K-12 classrooms. Around 5.6 million students across all 50 states and Canada are currently using Discovery Education. Discovery Education Streaming Plus, the comprehensive digital service supplementing instruction across all K-12 curricular areas, was recently the winner of the EdTech Digest’s Cool Tool Award in the Content Provider Solution category. Discovery Education Streaming Plus supplements instruction materials for all K–12 curricular areas. The supplemental materials include lesson plans, instructional strategies, and other content. Every possible source of content is available to students, including primary source documents, books, tapes, audio files, videos, podcasts, interviews, images, and more.
EzTraxx – This software is designed to offer professional development, graduate study/tuition reimbursement, and online training and teacher evaluation processes. This app saves time, slashes costs, and enables data-driven decision-making.
PebblePad– PebblePad is designed to act as an electronic portfolio (e-portfolio). It is a Personal Learning Space used in diverse learning contexts such as schools, colleges, universities, and professional bodies. It is useful for students, teachers, and testers for personal development planning; continuing professional development; and learning, teaching, and assessment. PebblePad was created with everything set to revolve around the student. It provides a framework to help users save records of learning, achievement, and goals. It also has a reflective structure underlining all its core elements.
PlayPosit– PlayPosit allows you to create interactive videos for your flipped classroom. It has revolutionary features that let instructors assess learning in real time and increase student participation. The admin dashboard helps to monitor success stats and provides content-specific, personalized professional development. Responsive videos fast-track learning by enhancing memory, making classes flow better and more efficiently.
SchoolZen – An administration solution that allows you to manage your school, critical data, student attendance, tests, examinations, parent portal, and so on. This software can be used to automate school management systems, build process workflows, and enhance communication systems and controls. It draws from lesson observation data and analytics to plan for teacher professional development.
Study.com – With over 25,000 video lessons and other resources, Study.com allows students to extend their knowledge of course content from home, or it can be incorporated into classroom lessons to meet student differentiation needs. There are options to take coursework for college credit, to receive homework help or complete study prep, and engage in professional development work. With videos ranging from the history of Sparta to working with fractions, Study.com can be used with students from K-12 and beyond. Any college credit earned is easily transferrable to over 1,500 U.S. colleges and universities. Teachers can enroll their classroom, assign videos and lessons, and even access printable resources such as worksheets designed to pair with video content.
SwiftAssess – An assessment authoring, management, delivery, and tracking platform for teachers, schools, universities, and professional training. With SwiftAssess, you get the following: automating admission, transforming students’ course work and activities, continuous professional development, and accreditation compliance. SwiftAssess brings a new dimension to the way students are evaluated and aligned with common core standards
Teach Boost – Teach Boost is a platform for teachers and administrators to assist in providing feedback and teacher evaluations. It is designed to foster effective educators and improve student outcomes. There are three segments in the Teach Boost program: Observations and Evaluations, Coaching and Mentorship, and Professional Development. Observations and Evaluations allow administrators to customize forms, rubrics, and observation cycles and streamline the overall evaluation process to fit the needs of the school. Coaching and Mentorship help develop sustainable coaching and mentoring programs through customized coaching engagements. It helps eliminate paperwork and simplifies scheduling. The Professional Development segment is a hub for schools to manage, document, and share professional development resources.
TurnItIn for Educators – TurnItIn for Educators is a website that helps support academic integrity in schools. Teachers can detect plagiarized content with the world’s most effective plagiarism detection software. Using forensic linguistic analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP), TurnItIn can determine if students are writing their own papers or using a third party. The website also provides professional development resources for teachers to improve the feedback they provide for students and lesson plans to use with students to build integrity skills.
Whetstone Education – A streamlined classroom observation software platform, Whetstone Education allows administrators to keep classroom observation notes, next steps, and weekly meeting agendas all in one place. With easy-to-use communication tools, administrators can conveniently share data and feedback with teachers and coaches. Whetstone Education also has built-in reporting features that make it easy to see each teacher’s professional growth needs to target coaching and professional development sessions.
Winjigo – This is a multipurpose, portable, user-friendly solution for all school management and administration activities. Winjigo is available in English, Arabic, and Spanish. It can be accessed anywhere, anytime. Features include tracked student performance, teacher professional development, reports, and analyses.
With real-time insights, schools are empowered to drive continuous improvement, optimize institutional effectiveness, and improve student achievement outcomes.