In my teaching at the City University of New York Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, I benefit from tools that help make my teaching more enjoyable, efficient — and hopefully more effective and engaging. Read on for the toolkit I rely on to help create a vibrant learning environment.

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Create a syllabus or lesson plan — Coda

Bring docs to life. Coda makes it easy to create interactive, engaging learning documents. You can embed a video welcome into your syllabus or include a map, podcast episode, or live chart right in your lesson plan. You can also include live buttons to let students interact with discussion questions or polls right within a doc. Pricing: Coda is free for most usage, with $12 /month billed annually for pro features. More on Why Coda is underrated.

Free template and resource: I made a free Digital Teaching Toolkit with templates you can use for a syllabus, lesson planning, teaching agenda and digital handouts.

Good Alternative: Craft is great for creating elegant one-page resources made up of visual cards that can be opened to reveal subsections with your text, images, and links. That’s ideal for a syllabus — or any handout.

Pricing: Craft is free for 10 docs and then 2 more each week, or $8/month billed annually for unlimited docs. Here’s my guide to Craft. (Note: I use Craft for the handouts I make for paid subscribers, like this).

Avoid: Canva is a fantastic tool for creating graphics, but the syllabus templates strike me as amateurish and clipart-y. Here’s a screenshot to illustrate.

Make engaging slides — Beautiful.ai

Create elegant slides quickly: I use Beautiful.ai for text and graphics slides and to create other visuals I use for teaching and writing.

Pricing: $12/month with a free trial. Free for students.

Example: this post’s lead graphic featuring the logos of these 10 teaching apps. Here’s a gif of some of the nice slide designs preferable to duller PowerPoint bullet points.

Good Alternative: Gamma allows you to include slides of various sizes along with live Web sites and videos. The AI makes it easy to redesign quickly. It’s one of the best new slide tools I’ve tested. Pricing: Free for initial usage, then $8 to $15 for plus or pro unlimited AI.

Invite: Drop in next Wednesday, Sept 4 between 1-2pm ET for a live AMA text chat. Ask me anything about my teaching toolkit or other apps and tools!

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Create a scavenger hunt — Goosechase

At CUNY I’ve hosted multiple online community games with Goosechase. I set up 30 little questions (screenshot), challenges and other “missions,” where students snap a picture of their breakfast or a favorite book, find a clue in the school, or otherwise share and engage with one another. It’s well-designed, easy to set up, fun to play, and great for community building.

Caveat: case-by-case pricing has increased significantly in recent years for higher ed and companies, to hundreds or thousands of dollars a year. It’s now too expensive for our budget. K-12 educators, on the other hand, can pay $99/year to create unlimited experiences for up to 40 students. Alternative: Use a free Google Doc like this — see a poster summing this up.

Design an interactive visual — Genially

Genially is the best tool I’ve encountered for taking a flat image or graphic and layering in interactive elements. You can add hotspots to an image, timeline, or map. This let readers click to see an informational pop-up, link or audio file. More on why I like it and how to use it.

Pricing: Free for teachers or $5/month billed annually for premium templates & other pro features. Example 1: showing prior student cohorts with an audio intro & clickable images. Example 2: a handout I created for teachers about making the most of the first day of class.

Co-create an idea board — Padlet

I love inviting students to collaborate on a Padlet board. It’s like a structured bulletin board where students can add ideas, images, links — even voice recordings or short videos. Students can also comment or respond to one another’s posts.

Pricing: Free for 3 boards or $100/year for unlimited boards. Here’s my guide to Padlet, and an example of a collaborative Padlet board you can contribute to about engaging teaching tactics.

Open a whiteboard for collaboration — Figjam

Google is sadly shutting down Jamboard, a bulletin board brainstorming tool I have long relied upon. Fortunately, Figjam offers an excellent alternative. It’s easy to use individually or in a group to add shapes, text, and images to a digital whiteboard. It’s free for educators, with lots of useful features like timers, commenting stamps, and templates for common icebreakers and brainstorming activities. You can even now use it for presentations.

Good alternatives: Mural, Miro, and Lucid are also excellent free whiteboarding tools for educators and students. Each has superb templates for common frameworks, icebreakers and brainstorms to make it easy to avoid having to start with a completely blank page.

Tip: budget 5 to 10 minutes for any live whiteboard session for participants to figure out how to navigate the platform’s palette with a sandbox board.

More of my favorite tools for teaching

Butter lets you host dynamic workshops online. Whereas Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and other such platforms are designed for generic meetings, Butter is designed for creative workshops and made by teachers for teachers. It’s increasingly my go-to tool for online workshops.

Slido is one of the teaching tools I use most often. I start workshops with quick word cloud polls, then ask for input throughout classes and online talks by sharing a link to Slido polls in the chat, or a QR code on screen.

Kahoot! always brings smiles to a class when the playful game music starts up. Add your own quiz questions or draw from a huge library. I appreciate the variety of question types. You can let people drop pins on an image, fill in a blank, guess a number, order items in a list, and more. Game music, points, and a digital podium for winners add fun game elements. Good quiz game alternatives include Gimkit and Blooket.

Pear Deck enables you to gauge student understanding and perspectives with quick, easy interactive check-in questions. It’s aimed at elementary and high school teachers, but I like using it for grad school students and professional learners. It lets me share slides that students can annotate, respond to, circle answers on, and more. Here’s why I like it so much.

Maven is the most vibrant platform I’ve found for marketing & delivering live online courses. Here’s an AI workshop I’m collaborating on with Nikita Roy.

Pathwright is one of the best-kept secrets in online learning. It’s an elegantly-designed service for creating learning paths for online courses and training. Rather than the messy, confusing menus common in learning management systems like Blackboard, Pathwright offers a simple path for learners to follow one step at a time. I’m using it for a new learning path I’m launching soon for subscribers!

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