The year of 2019 is coming to an end. To prepare you for a fresh start in the new year, here are 10 Ed Tech tools that can make your school life more interesting and effective.

1- Anchor.fm

If you are interested to create podcasts in the new year, you may want to try out this platform. It makes easier for distributing the podcasts to all the major networks such as Apple Podcasts and Google Play.

2- Canva

Want to make your poster/flyer/newsletter/infographics/cards/brochure look more professional and eye-catching? Canva is always your best friend! There are thousands of free templates on their website! Moreover, most of them are FREE! Best of all, teachers can get all of the pro features of Canva for free at canva.com/education.

3- Padlet

Padlet allows you to make beautiful boards, documents, and webpages that are handy to contribute and easy to read. The collaborative nature of the tool allows you to organize shared notes, gather ideas and opinions from different people at the same time, etc. You can always exercise your creativity and make the tool useful to you! See a great example for SEL resources created by Areté's executive director.

4- Slido

This new tool enables you to easily add interactive poll questions and quiz to your Google Slides presentations!

5- Educandy

Trying to design and create games to make the learning process more engaging and interesting? Try out Educandy! You can create interactive learning games through this tool! All you need to do is to enter questions and answers, Educandy will turn the content into cool interactive activities in minutes! Once the activity is created, a code will be generated. Share the code with others and PLAY!

6- BoClips

BoClips houses more than 2 million curated and copyright-cleared educational videos by minimizing the distractions typically associated with YouTube. They have 160+ content partners and the video content spans over 40+ academic subjects. You can find suitable videos for all age levels from their database.

7-ClassTools

This is a powerful website to help you create free games, quizzes, activities and diagrams in seconds! In 2019, they have added an interactive image generator template and more new game templates!

8- VidReader

This service allows you to generate a transcript of any YouTube videos containing spoken English! Transcripts created are hyperlinked with timestamps and printable.

9- Glide Apps

Trying to develop an app but having no previous knowledge about coding? No worries! Glide makes it possible for you to easily create an app from a Google Sheet and customize it on your needs. Create easy-to-use apps without writing a code! Most importantly, it's FREE.

10- Microsoft's Immersive Reader

This tool has been making reading more friendly than ever. It offers numerous reading support functions, including but not limited to read-aloud functions, font spacing and enlargement, syllabus highlighting and line focus. It was first designed to support students with dyslexia and dysgraphia, but can also support anyone who simply wants their reading experience on devices more enjoyable and convenient.

Post content adapted from Richard Byrne's newsletter (richard@byrne.media): Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week - Best New & Updated Tools in 2019.