The Teacher's Guide to Tech 2021 | Cult of Pedagogy Classroom

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You are currently on the page for the 2021 tech guide! Click here to go to our main page and find the guide for the current year.

Is keeping up with technology making your head spin?

As soon as you learn one tool, it changes. Or another, better one comes along to take its place. In fact, you barely have time to learn new tools. You have lessons to plan and papers to grade and meetings to attend and actual live human beings to teach.

You want to be more tech-savvy. You might even be feeling pressured by your school, by your colleagues, or by society in general to keep up with it. But there’s just no time.

Help is here.

The Teacher’s Guide to Tech is like an encyclopedia of ed tech tools. With this guide in hand, you're going stop feeling overwhelmed and start getting excited about how technology can help your students learn and help you do your job with more efficiency, more awareness, and more joy.

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In this guide, I have gathered over 450 educational technology tools and grouped them into 57 categories, including tools for assessment, note taking, parent engagement, interactive lessons, and so much more!

To introduce each category, I talk about how the tools in that collection can personalize learning, help you manage behavior or time, enhance collaboration, and allow students to explore their passions.

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Then I take a few of the most popular or most interesting tools and look closely at each one: First, I give you a description of what the tool does in clear, simple language. Then I show you a screenshot of the tool in action. You'll also get a link to the tool’s website and a play button that takes you straight to a video showing how the tool works. If there’s another tool out there that’s similar to this one, I’ll give you a link to that so you can check it out.

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If you want to look at the other tools in the same category, you can easily click around to compare them. Because all of this is happening on a PDF, and you’re not waiting for different website pages to load, it’s crazy fast.

And there’s more! A glossary of over 125 tech terms helps you understand the jargon you hear when people talk about tech.

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To make the tools even easier to find, the guide also includes a completely hyperlinked index of terms. So when you hear the name of a tool and you have no idea what it does, you can come here, go to the page where I describe it, and quickly get up to speed.

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You can keep this PDF on your laptop, desktop, even on a tablet. And I created the whole guide on 8.5 by 11-inch paper, so you can also print it out and stick it in a binder.

New in 2021

For the 2021 edition, I have added over 90 new listings, including six brand-new sections on Financial Literacy, Images & Icons, Keyboarding, Media Literacy, Social Justice & Anti-Racism, and Vocabulary Builders.

There's also a new four-page section on Remote and Hybrid Learning, which summarizes the key things I've learned through interviews and other resources about teaching under current conditions, plus a hyperlinked list of the tools in the guide that are most relevant to teaching in remote or hybrid situations.

Right now, tens of thousands of people are developing mind-blowing, creative tools that can equip you to teach more effectively, save a lot of time, and empower your students. The Teacher's Guide to Tech brings their work to you.

I can't wait to see what you're going to do with it.

Your Instructor

Jennifer Gonzalez

Jennifer Gonzalez

Here are the official credentials: B.S. in Secondary Education from Penn State University, 1993. M.A. in Writing and Publishing from Emerson College, 2002. National Board Certification in Early Adolescence/English Language Arts, 2004. Seven years of teaching middle school language arts. Four years of teaching pre-service teachers at the college level.

At the end of that run, I thought I knew a lot about teaching. Then in 2013 I created my website, Cult of Pedagogy, to be a place where teachers could fully geek out on our craft. Since then, I've learned so much more about this profession than I ever did when I was doing it. For over a decade, I have been researching and sharing effective teaching practices, exploring the social and emotional stuff that impacts our work, sampling the tech tools that help us along the way, and looking inside real classrooms to learn from teachers who are thinking outside the box. I learn new things every day from the teachers, researchers, and experts who share their knowledge with me on my site, and my goal is to shape that knowledge into digestible packages I can deliver to classroom teachers everywhere so you can get better every day.

What's Inside

The Teacher's Guide to Tech

Available in days

days after you enroll

Frequently Asked Questions

I thought this was a guide...why is it listed as a "course"?

I am selling the Teacher's Guide to Tech through Teachable because it allows me to make it available to groups at a discounted rate. Teachable started as a platform for selling online courses, so they call all materials "courses," even though some things are just resources, like this one. The Teacher's Guide to Tech is not actually a course.

Does this purchase entitle me to free updates of the guide?

No. I publish an updated version of the guide every year, with new tools, updated information, updated videos, and the removal of tools that have become obsolete or are not being used very often. Customers who wish to have a fully updated version of the guide must purchase a new license when the new update is available.

Is this a one-time purchase? Does the license have an expiration date or a limited time period?

Your license is for the 2021 guide. That guide will be available here for the life of the product (in other words, for as long as I am still creating teaching products). I will keep it here even after later editions are created, but to make sure you never lose it, your best bet is to just download the PDF and store it on your own computer.

How do multiple licenses work?

To purchase this guide for a group, choose the number of licenses from the options below. Once you've made your purchase, we will contact you within a few hours to send you a unique coupon code good for the number of licenses you purchased. When you get this code, just distribute it to every user. Each license holder just needs to log in to the Teacher's Guide to Tech as if they were a new buyer, but they'd use the code to access the guide free of charge. More detailed instructions will be emailed to you after your purchase.

I teach in grades K-2. Will this guide be relevant to my work?

Absolutely! Quite a few of the tools are designed for teacher-only use, such as those for assessment, parent engagement, collaboration with colleagues, and curating your own resources. Another group will be ideal for helping you create content for your students, such as interactive posters, QR codes, screencasting, and presentation tools. The guide also includes a good number of tools early readers can use, such as mind-mapping tools, image-making tools, podcasting tools, and book publishing tools. Many of the other tools that are intended for skilled readers would make an excellent resource for providing extra challenge to your students with advanced skills.

I teach at a university and would like to use this book as part of my course. Can you give my students a discounted rate on the guide?

Yes, a student rate can be arranged for your course. Please use the contact form (link below) to get in touch with us. When you write, give us your name, the name of your institution, your course code, and the approximate number of students you have or expect to have for the course. We will set up a unique coupon code that your students can use to purchase their own guide at a discounted rate.

Can I pay with a purchase order?

Yes! We accept purchase orders from U.S. customers for any order of $25 and over; for international customers, the minimum amount for a purchase order is $99. Please click on the link below the pricing table to start the process. After you complete the form, we will contact you with a quote.

What is your refund policy?

Because the guide is a digital download, there is no way to reverse the purchase once it has been made, so we only offer refunds if you have made the purchase in error or if you are unhappy with the guide. To request a refund, please contact us at [email protected]. In your correspondence, please let us know why you would like the refund and we will work with you to find a solution.

This course is not currently open for enrollment.

Purchase Orders

We accept purchase orders from U.S. customers for any order of $25 and over; for international customers, the minimum amount for a purchase order is $99. To generate a quote for a purchase order when the course opens for enrollment, please fill out this form and someone from our team will contact you with an invoice.

Other Questions

If you have another question that hasn't been answered here, please get in touch with our contact form.