Speaker 1: If you're a teacher or an online educator, the next 12 free of cost education tools will help you boost your engagement with your students or audience. And all these free tools are unmissable in 2021, as they certainly will make your next classroom session super fun for your learners. We will rank them on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the highest, in order of learner engagement that they will bring in. There are chapters in the video, so if you're already familiar with a certain tool and want to skip ahead, please use the chapters so you do not miss out on anything. Also, as Teacher's Day is just around the corner while I'm making this video, happy Teacher's Day and let's begin. Starting with the first one, PictoChart. Improve your topic communication with PictoChart. Turn any text or data-heavy content into visual stories. You may use it for creating a poster or a pre and a post handout for your classroom sessions. Also, this can come super handy to put up and explain a poster somewhere inside the classroom to drive your point visually. One of the best features is the ability to select an infographic template based on the list of things to do or trying to showcase a timeline or displaying comparison. And don't we all learn better with infographics? There is a free forever version which will be enough for most of you to use their ready-made templates. Though this would be a great teaching resource for your visual learners on student engagement scale, we will give this a 5 out of 10. Up next, we have Screencast-o-matic. Screencast-o-matic is an excellent tool for screen recording along with a video of you speaking side-by-side. This is super helpful when you want to share a document or a file with someone but cannot describe all the details in an email. So a quick video of yours along with the screen recording will make it so much easier. For giving instructions for an assignment completion in a certain way, this could be your new go-to application for your young learners. General use case of recording your screen only or screen and audio also exist. But the best feature certainly is using both screen recording and your video. Minimum recording time in the free version will be for 15 minutes which should be more than enough for most users. On student engagement scale, we will give this a 6 out of 10. Ever wonder how newsreaders blabber out so many things accurately? Wonder no more, cause our next app is Teleprompter app by PodDrop. An absolutely easy app to use. Teleprompter app can be very handy when you have to record a video on a technical subject and you want to speak all details correctly. Simply paste your script, select it and hit the record button. You will see the words are scrolling and you can read them when you're looking at the camera. You can adjust the speed of the scroll to make it suit your speech. The app is free to use with a limited number of scripts. You may want to try other teleprompter apps as well but teleprompting overall is a great tool for creating flawless videos without having to worry about saying something incorrect. In our student engagement scale, we will give teleprompter app a 6.5 out of 10. Next on our list is Poll Everywhere. It is a brilliant tool to keep your user engaged especially in the middle of a long session when you know you want to ensure that your audience is following you and not their dream to go to Switzerland. It is the ease of use which makes Poll Everywhere very popular. You can simply put up a question on a screen and you will be able to see real-time answers getting generated from the users as they share their feedback. Slido is another such app in the category of getting live feedback and engagement but Poll Everywhere has way many options like the simple way of asking the student to tap and show where are they from on a map. Ain't that just great? The free version will allow you to take responses from 40 attendees for a question. On a student engagement scale, we will give this a 7 out of 10. Moving up and ahead, our next tool is Padlet. Padlet is a great substitute for your school bulletin board where kids can put up things creatively to share with others. It could be pictures, links to website, links to another Padlet itself, videos or even capture their own videos and audios directly into a Padlet. All in a beautiful looking one-pager design which makes it easy to review each other's work. Also eddyblogs.org is another great option to create a full-fledged blog by teachers which can be restricted and given specific access to students only. But Padlet is so much more than just a blog and out of the two, if I had to use one, I would go with Padlet any day. Three Padlets are available to be created in the free version. For a collaborative experience and a neat design, Padlet gets a 7.5 rating on our score of user engagement. Don't we all just aspire to create our own website? Only if it was as easy as writing an email. Well, don't just aspire anymore. Get ready to acquire a new tool to help you do just that. Google Sites. Google Sites is an absolutely free tool just like Google Slides, Gmail or Google Drive. Simply love Google for providing these free tools to us. It is a powerful website builder and in a few clicks you will have a website created which you can privately share with students only with a link or set access privileges on email login. Option to create the website is as simple as drag and drop. It comes with pre-created templates. You can add text, images, videos, links and documents. Place a handout or document for your students to download, pre or post your class. You can create a website with multiple pages and create schedule from Google Calendar or have a newsletter page. Possibilities are endless. You can also have a Google Form feature and create page on the site where students can fill the form and share their feedback with you. For the small learning curve, large variety of possibilities and reliability of Google Apps, Google Sites gets a 8 out of 10 on user engagement. Puzzled how simple that was? Don't worry, our next tool will puzzle you furthermore. Puzzle Maker from Discovery Education. Alright, Puzzle Maker from Discovery helps you create and print customized word search, crisscross, math puzzles and many more things using your own word list. These are great icebreakers or fillers for your classes and it is super easy to use. For example, to create a word puzzle, it is as easy as title, size of your word puzzle, adding the words of your choice which you want the learners to find and simply hit create my puzzle and it will automatically create the puzzle for you. You can print and share this with your class. There are more puzzles to experiment with like this, like number blocks, maze puzzles and at the top of my list, cryptogram. You can have engaged students for hours together by creating a series of these puzzles or give them these as an assignment to complete by increasing the difficulty level for advanced students. This can be an excellent brain booster exercise. For the simplicity of access, absolutely free and high level of cerebral engagement, Puzzle Maker from Discovery gets a 8 out of 10 on our student engagement. Up from an 8 score, we have iMovie. iMovie is a video editing software application developed by Apple and it is ridiculously simple for the powerful performance. It has an easy to understand drag and drop timeline so you can split clips, freeze frames, increase or decrease video speed at cool transitions and titles. For the kind of software that it is, there are incredible tools to do basic color correction for your videos, stabilize a handheld video, reduce background noise from clip, adjust audio levels and even add sounds from Apple provided sound library. You can export your final videos in multiple formats or directly publish them on YouTube. Anyone who has an Apple product and has never opened iMovie on it, they are only using half of what they have paid for that product. You will be able to learn everything about iMovie by just making one single video. It is that simple. It comes free and pre-loaded with Apple products and continues to be free for life. For a very close experience for Windows PC users, use OpenShot. OpenShot is again completely free software for life and comes very close to some of the features of iMovie. For a beginner's learning curve, powerful performance and freedom of creating stunning videos with titles and transitions, iMovie gets an 8.5 out of 10 on our user engagement. Raising the bar ahead from 8.5, we have Flipgrid. Flipgrid is an amazing community creating app which is based on sharing videos on topics or questions generated by teachers. The level of engagement is off the charts. It is quite secure as you can create ID and passwords for each student and only students with access to your group code will be able to see that group. Students can see each other's submission, like or comment on each other's videos or even leave a video response for another person's video. For creating content on a topic, the teachers have enough flexibility to use video for the topic, image links, gifs etc. You can set a maximum record time for every submission as well. And here is the best part of Flipgrid. Flipgrid is completely free. There are no plans, no pricing. It was bought over by Microsoft and Microsoft made it absolutely free and integrated it with their own applications like MS Teams. Hard to believe right? Microsoft giving things for free. How about an Xbox for me Microsoft? Hmm? What do you think about that? And how about you all liking this video and subscribing to the channel? That's free too. Click on the link over here to see the entire channel. For excellent community creation tools, super video based interaction, Flipgrid gets a 9 out of 10 on our student engagement. Coming to our top 3 and at the third place we have Quizzizz. I hope I'm saying that right. Quizzizz. Pretty sure I'm getting a Russian accent there. Quizzizz. Quizzizz is another quizzing app which is free for 100 students per lesson and assignment. The interface is fairly simple for creators and super fun for learners. You can create classes, add students and create live quizzes to be played. The best feature is the ability to share an assignment to be completed by the student at their own pace. As students start giving answers, they will be able to see leaderboards showing how their friends have answered and where they are standing amongst their peers. This creates a great gamified learning experience driven by the student itself. There are really cool power-up features which students can opt for to double up their point earnings, eliminate point earnings of another student, freeze time for other players and glitch students screens. Hey, it's all fair and love and war and healthy competitive quiz. For a very engaging interface, simple to create quiz options and the cool power-up features, Quizzizz. Quizzizz gets a 9 out of 10 in our student engagement scale. Placing itself on the second position is Trivia Maker. Trivia Maker is not only a great tool for quizzing but it will give you a game show host feel. You can create your own custom games or select from pre-created games. The free version allows you to create unlimited games but you can play it with the complexity of only two teams. If you wish to make more teams, you will have to purchase a license. The free version will be cool enough for you to have fun with your students. With the basic option, you can create a quiz with grid, trivia or a list. You can have three different rounds summing up to a final winner with each round having different format. There are videos for each game style and how to easily create them but most of them are intuitive and require no prior knowledge. There are cool animations, sounds and casting features like ability to keep the gamer master screen different from what the users will see. For the super cool looking user interface which the students will love, the game show style quizzing experience which will generate a lot of noise in your classes, Trivia Maker gets a 9.5 on our student engagement scale. And topping in our ranking is the tool which every teacher must have. It's a Starbucks coffee app because all teachers need some coffee to stay alive. I'm just kidding. Topping our tool chart is Kahoot. Kahoot has become a household name since COVID pandemic has spread. Many people jumped on using this for online parties with friends and family. There are pre-built quizzes which can be used directly to play or users can create their own custom quizzes. But originally Kahoot was and still continues to create a more in-depth solution for educators. Use cases shown by them like read student who are not at school, break the ice and reward, collect student opinion with word cloud, turn learners into leaders has clearly made Kahoot come out on the top of our list. It has a very small learning curve hence anyone can start using it. Also what makes it really popular is a large community of people creating Kahoot on a daily basis which gives you an opportunity to just pick freely available quizzes and get going. Teachers have a free access to Kahoot to engage up to 50 players per game which certainly will be enough for most classrooms. Its paid plans include creating entire lesson plans, managing assignments and a bundle of education apps from Kahoot at all an extremely nominal fee for teachers. On a student engagement scale Kahoot gets a 10 out of 10 on user engagement. So there you have it a list of 12 great tools for teachers to use in 2021 ranked based on the user engagement scale and all of them are absolutely free to use. Quizlet, Storyboard, GameKit did not make the cut as their free versions were capped for a limited amount of time. Also some full school communication management apps like ClassDojo, Slack, Editio are not in direct control of teachers to implement. Hence they are not a part of this list as well. Do leave a comment down and let me know if you wish to see an in-depth tutorial on any of these tools in future and don't forget to share this video with your friends and colleagues who you think will really benefit from knowing about all these free tools. If you've made it to the end of the video then thank you for watching and I will see you in the next one.