THE BEST OF THE BEST: Since the first issue of the educator-facing Instruct newsletter, we’ve tracked the top ten apps or tools of each year based on readers’ clicks. To celebrate our 200th Instruct edition (which debuted this past Thursday), we’ve packed in a little treat: Check out the S’Cool Tools that earned the coveted #1 position from each of the past three years--enjoy!
2014: Printable Paper - Free! If your desk supplies are as disorganized as ours are, Printable Paper might just save morale. Print out 1,300+ different (and useful!) paper templates, including budgets and graphing paper. Try out their printable history timelines, storyboards and seating charts for your classroom. We might start using the Battleship Game paper to leave office notes—after all, blank printer paper is so last week.
2013: Brilliant - Free! Brilliant is one way to keep your science and math whiz kids regularly engaged and challenged. Students receive challenge problems each week that they complete and then compare against their peers all over the world. They can see where they match up against others based on country and age and share strategies with others students. The site also hosts competitions involving game theory, writing algorithms and other fun shenanigans.
2012: No Excuse List - Free! As the name suggests, this site aggregates "the best places on the web to learn anything for free." Topics include Academics, Cooking, Music, DIY, Languages, Programming, and Music. We don't claim to be experts in any of these topics, but as far as Academics and Programming go, these guys are on the ball (technically TED-Ed is missing but they included TEDTalks). Drop a note to them if you know of important resources that are missing: noexcuselist@gmail.com.