How do you know a good edtech product when you see one? In April, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan released a free guide to “help entrepreneurs apply technology in smart ways to solve identified and persistent problems in education.” The Ed Tech Developer’s Guide: A Primer for Developers, Startups and Entrepreneurs specifically endorses Kaplan, Inc.’s best-practice approach to assessing whether an edtech product or service aligns with learning science principles:

“Developers who are not aware of the foundations of cognitive science, instructional design, or the learning sciences can miss out on opportunities for high-impact design and ways to systematically build in features from the collection of effectiveness data that can help them improve their product. To get an idea as to whether your product is aligned with the core tenets of learning science research… try using a checklist like Kaplan’s Educational Product Evaluation Checklist.”

The checklist covers twelve areas deemed essential to product satisfaction: objectives, assessment, practice, examples, information, multimedia, overviews, integration, motivation, organisation, usability, and personalisation. You can read the full details here.

Below we want to offer up a list of edtech products we’ve been hearing a lot about, inspired by Duncan’s mission. As always, feel free to add your favourites in the comments section.

Best Edtech Products For Educators

1. BrainPop is a group of educational websites with over 1,000 short animated movies for students in grades K-12, together with quizzes and related materials, covering the subjects of science, social studies, English, mathematics, engineering and technology, health, and arts and music.
2. Teachscape offers software tools, online content and services designed to allow educators to assess their skills, collaborate and build their expertise.

3. Hopscotch is an iPad app dedicated to teaching kids the coding language. HopScotch’s functionality is an easy-to-use visual programming language that enables kids to create their own games and animations.
4. Gummii is an innovative, game-based math learning system that builds kids’ motivation and adapts to their individual learning needs. Gummii looks like a game but functions like a math tutor, covering everything from fractions to additions & subtractions.
5. Google Art Project is an online platform through which the public can access high-resolution images of artworks housed in the initiative’s partner museums.
6. Haiku Deck makes it easy to create beautiful presentations that will wow your audience–whether you’re pitching an idea, teaching a lesson, telling a story, or igniting a movement.
7. Oliveboard is an online platform that enables students to learn and prepare for exams such as CAT, GMAT, CMAT, XAT, GRE, and bank exams. It uses learning analytics to personalise the test prep experience.
8. Socrative lets teachers engage and assess their students with educational activities on tablets, laptops and smartphones. Through the use of real time questioning, instant result aggregation and visualisation, teachers can gauge the whole class’ current level of understanding. Socrative saves teachers time so the class can further collaborate, discuss, extend and grow as a community of learners.
9. English LaunchPad is an iOS app designed specifically for English Teachers. Features include grammar structures, whiteboard, lesson plans, translator, practice exercises, quiz generator, student register, student tracking, and flashcards.
10. Bobo Explores Light is an award-winning app designed for children ages 8-12. It introduces kids to 21 light-related topics like lasers, reflection, refraction, photosynthesis, bioluminescence, aurora borealis, and the human eye. In each section, readers engage in hands-on experimentation to build a deeper understanding of science concepts. Supplementary videos, articles, animations and trivia are designed to meet children at whatever learning level they feel most comfortable.
11. Doceri is an interactive whiteboard and screencast recording app for iPads that allows hand-drawn graphics.
12. Sponge Lab offers powerful toolsets for organising, delivering, and sharing customisable lessons with your students and fellow teachers.
13. Labster lets you integrate real-world scenarios with 3D animations visualising life science down to the molecular level. Integrate curriculum theory and relevant quiz questions with hands-on virtual practises and animations that increase student engagement and learning.
14. Anatomy 4D is an interactive dissection-simulation database and a state of the art education platform to study gross anatomy develop course syllabus and evaluate students’ knowledge. 4D Anatomy‘s interactive simulation provides striking visual experience and reproduces anatomical dissections on computers never seen before. It helps to understand the intricate structural details of the human body providing far superior imagery and interaction as opposed to animation or illustration based applications.
15. Dragon Dictation is an easy-to-use voice recognition application that allows you to easily speak and instantly see your text content for everything from email messages to blog posts on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch.
16. ExitTicket isa student response system designed by teachers. See performance and progression metrics for each individual student and the course as a whole, all in real-time.
17. Mathspace is a step-by-step adaptive maths program that provides students with guided feedback. A highly rated platform out of Australia.
18. Wikispace Classroom is a social writing platform where you can communicate with students and work on writing projects alone or in teams. Rich assessment tools give you the power to measure student contribution and engagement in real-time.
19. Learning Ace combines the most relevant educational materials today with its next-generational adaptive learning technology. Recognising that it is challenging for most students to complete their college studies successfully, the team at Learning Ace aims to provide students with the most compelling personalised educational experience based on their ongoing learning gaps.
20. CK12 offers free online textbooks, flashcards, and simulations–all with a personalised touch.
21. NoRedInk helps students improve their grammar/writing skills by generating sentences from their favorite celebrities, friends, and personal interests.
22. Bright Orange Box (from LumenED). With an internal battery providing up to 3 hours of uninterrupted playback, the 3G-connected Bright Orange Box offers a unique solution to the internet access problem in developing countries. The Box can be charged from a traditional wall outlet or using a portable solar-charging unit. The Box has projector and speakers that are bright and loud enough for an entire classroom. A large touchscreen makes navigating and playing multimedia content easy. The new Bright Orange Box will enter classrooms in India, Ghana and Senegal in Summer 2015.
23. BloomBoard supports professional development in three ways: 1) by allowing teachers to set explicit goals and share those goals with their administrators; 2) by allowing administrators to track their observations of teachers’ practices and the associated data; and 3) by recommending specific actions or resources that are available in the BloomBoard marketplace to teachers to help them achieve their goals.
As of 2014, BloomBoard has been adopted by 500 districts in five states, and over 283,000 teachers.
24. Kahoot! lets you ‘drag & drop’ to build quizzes with embedded imagery and video based on educational content. Without needing an account, everyone in the room quickly joins through their personal device, seeing their name appear at the front. They can then answer questions in real time through an easy-to-use interface and play against each other, aiming to top the on-screen leaderboard, while you facilitate and discuss the content.
25. Creaza is the leading global educational toolbox for the creative expression of knowledge and skills in the classroom and spare time. We empower educators and students with the technology to create movies, cartoons, mind maps, presentations, soundscapes and much more. The story begins in 2007 when great ideas emerged into one great solution for learning and education. Creaza AS was established as Norwegian based company with a global market. The company’s mission was to provide an online creative toolbox for children, to be used both in school and at home.
26. Gyldendal, a respected European publishing house founded in 1925, is partnering with Knewton to create the first continuously adaptive learning application for students in Norway.
As primary and secondary students progress through the program, Knewton technology will analyse what every student knows and how they learn best, then provide personalised content recommendations to help more students master material. Gyldendal will also provide Knewton-powered analytics to help teachers identify student needs, predict performance, and tailor instruction.
27. Apropos is an adaptive learning program. Information and data from Apropos can be used inform assignments, augment lesson plans and make online inquiry simple. The resulting reporting and analytics are available on demand, exposing the most popular curated content in any Apropos-enabled subject area.
28. Picmonic turns the information you need to know into unforgettable images and stories that will make studying easier than ever. Most useful for medical, premed, and nursing students.
29. Khan Academy provides concise video tutorials on math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more.
30. Remind is a free, safe, easy-to-use communication tool that helps teachers connect instantly with students and parents. Use Remind to send quick announcements to your entire course or start a chat for one-to-one conversation.
31. Edmodo lets you quickly create groups, assign homework, schedule quizzes, manage progress, and more. With everything on one platform, Edmodo reinforces and enhances what you’re already doing in your course.
32. ClassDojo was built by more than 3 million teachers worldwide. It’s a course management tool that allows you to give personalised feedback to each student or the whole course.
33. Teachley creates apps based on cognitive science research. They’ve created the first algorithm that detects kids’ math strategies. As students play Teachley’s fun and engaging games, Teachley provide you with meaningful data analytics, identifying: students at-risk, Common Core and other state standards met, how to group students, and what lessons to teach next.
34. Shadow Puppet Edu is a resource-rich video slideshow app that lets kids deepen their understanding across content areas, creating presentations and showcasing their knowledge.
35. Learning Registry, begun in 2010, is creating a set of technical protocols as a platform for innovation by content authors and aggregators. Applications built to harness the power of harvesting and analyzing the Learning Registry data will allow educators to quickly find content specific to their unique needs. The Learning Registry will store more than traditional descriptive data (metadata)–it will also allow sharing of ratings, comments, downloads, standards alignment, etc.
36. EduCanon is a free online application for creating and sharing interactive video lessons. Teachers can take any video content from YouTube, Vimeo, or similar sites and transform it into an active learning experience for their students.

37. Clever enables users to access all of their software with just a single click, eliminating the need for separate user names and passwords. No more time wasted manually updating the student roster in every school-based application whenever there is a change. Clever not only makes data entry cheaper and quicker but totally mistake-proofs this entire process, so there are no more errors during data entry.
38. ALEKS is an artificially intelligent assessment and learning system. It uses adaptive questioning to quickly determine what a student knows, then instructs the student on the topics he or she is most ready to learn.

39. RealizeIt is an adaptive learning platform out of Dublin, Ireland. It automatically profiles each piece of content, allowing it to match learner profiles to maximise the chance of success. It also builds metrics for each person on the effectiveness of the resource types that are available, allowing it to figure out what works well for each person.
40. Fishtree takes the idea of a traditional LMS an expands on it in a big way. Not only does Fishtree cover all the roles of a typical LMS; it also helps teachers differentiate their instruction, incorporate media, and a whole lot more, thus making it an “adaptive learning platform.”
41. iReady combines adaptive diagnostics with teacher-led and online instruction for a complete blended learning solution for K-12 reading and math. Students are able to complete instructional lessons at home on their own.

42. Dreambox Learning adapts to the individual learner, offering
continuous formative assessment in and between lessons and analysing over 48,000 data points per student, per hour to provide the right next lesson at the right time.
43. GameMaker: Studio is one of the most popular game-creation tools, meaning it comes with active support forums and numerous opportunities to participate in a learning community that extends outside the course.
44. Google Apps for Education is a free online software that includes e-mail, calendars, and productivity tools for collaborative learning any time, anywhere. It’s widely popular and easily adaptable to any learning curriculum.

45. Canva for Education helps you incorporate visuals across the curriculum. “Canva is a nice tool for designing infographics, collages, flyers, and slides in your web browser or on your iPad,” says Richard Byrne, author of FreeTech4Teachers. “I’ve been a fan of the service since it launched. In fact, I like it so much that I became an unpaid advisor to them when they started thinking about developing resources specifically for teachers.”

46.BuildYourOwnCurriculum is an online curriculum portal for the entire school community. It lets students see the standards they’re expected to master, helps teachers customise their lesson plans in alignment with district goals, and shows administrators the learning paths in each building, grade, and classroom.

47. Buncee, a cloud-based “creation canvas,” makes it easy for students and teachers to create and share digital stories, presentations, and more.

48. Edsby is a web-based social learning system that runs on any device and facilitates information sharing across a school or district. Students can check their schedules and interact with classes; parents can see their kids’ homework and grades; teachers have access to course planning, attendance, and assessment tools; and administrators can identify at-risk students.

49. Eduvision is an online portal for hosting, streaming, and sharing video content. Eduvision helps schools “use the power of video to transform education, enabling new teaching methods such as flipped and blended learning, providing 24/7 professional development for teachers, and enabling live streaming to build community involvement and engagement,” said Robert Reppert, school technology coordinator for the Mississippi Bend Area Education Agency in Iowa. “Eduvision makes it easy, and safe, to create and share educational videos. It protects student privacy and provides a secure, easily managed repository for curriculum assets that can be integrated into an LMS and also syndicated for sharing across districts and even states.”

50. Fast ForWord is an online reading intervention product that uses the principles of neuroplasticity–the ability of the brain to rewire and improve–to treat the underlying cause of language and reading difficulties.