Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

At last count, there were over 80,000 educational apps available to teachers. There are apps for everything: literacy, STEM, productivity, audiovisual, etc. There are apps which improve accessibility for students with different learning challenges, i.e. text to voice, voice to text, etc. While many of these may be a dream come true for educators, the dizzying array of choices is also a nightmare. Teachers just don’t have time to filter through thousands of apps to find the one that works best for the needs of their students. To help, we started to create curated lists of the best apps in …

"At last count, there were over 80,000 educational apps available to teachers. While many of these may be a dream come true for educators, the dizzying array of choices is also a nightmare. Teachers just don’t have time to filter through thousands of apps to find the one that works best for the needs of their students."

Having worked as a teacher for years, I am impressed by how rapidly technology is changing classroom teaching and learning experience.

Countless EdTech tools have been created to make educators’ lives easier, and I’m excited to see the even more innovative and intelligent products that will be developed, even as soon as in the next year.

For example, last year EdTech Magazine reviewed a few trends like Virtual Reality (VR), 3D printing and wearable devices that could affect classrooms in both K–12 and higher education—and in reality it’s already happening.

As the world economy shifts away from manufacturing jobs and towards service industry and creative jobs, there’s a consensus among parents, educators, politicians and business leaders that it is crucial students graduate into university or the workforce with the ability to identify and solve complex problems, think critically about information, work effectively in teams and communicate clearly about their thinking.

Online educational tools are changing the way we learn. Noodle predicts which free apps and tools will be most influential in the education sphere in 2015.