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This is day 8 of "The 30 Day Blog Binge." Learn more

I was told a few days ago that my partner and I have money written into our department's budget for blended learning. As I processed this information, I realized something: I have no idea how to spend money.

To be in the classroom is to be frugal. Teachers do everything on a shoestring, finding the best free tool to do whatever we need to do. It's a way of thinking that is ingrained in me far deeper than I realized.

With that in mind, I started compiling a list of all the free tools I'd used or trained on during my decade-plus time in education. It's amazing the high-quality tools that are available to educators for absolutely free. Some will be familiar, so may not. Some are completely free, soup-to-nuts. Others have such a robust free version that you'll never need to upgrade. Then there are those who provide a free version for educators that gives you full access to what the rest of the world has to pay for.

I've coded each one according to elementary or secondary and the content area it best supports: reading, math, science, social studies, computer science or engineering (R, M, Sci, SS, CompSci, E). For those multi-purpose tools, I'll simply tag them as "All." This list is by no means exhaustive, nor is it in any particular order. They're just the tools I've grown to love and rely on. Enjoy!

1. Nearpod (elementary & secondary | all | presentation)

Nearpod can truly revolutionize the way you present information to your students. Move from static PowerPoints at the front of the room to interactive presentations on each student device. Build in polls, quizzes, open-ended questions, and now even virtual field trips. Additionally, the Nearpod library has a ridiculous amount of free presentations you can add to your own library and edit freely.

2. Doceri (elementary & secondary | all | flipped videos)

This iPad app got me started on the road to creating flipped lessons. One of the things I love the most is that you can record all your strokes and writing in advance, then play it back and record yourself talking over it. With super-simple upload to YouTube, the things I did in my STEM lab would not have been possible without Doceri.

The paid side of the app lets you download a client to your desktop and project whatever you're writing in the Doceri app onto your screen. This lets you move anywhere in the room and still control what's on the board. It's also pretty cool to hand your iPad off to a student and let them show their work. That part of Doceri is $30, but to me, it was worth it.

3. SeeSaw (elementary | all | eportfolio)

Conceivably, you could use SeeSaw with secondary students, I just think the interface leans more toward elementary. SeeSaw is one of the most incredible apps I've ever seen. Available as an app for iOS, Android and now Chrome, SeeSaw gives students the power to record their work and save it in their eportfolio. Once an assignment has been photographed, recorded, or uploaded, any parent who has signed up also gets a notification in the SeeSaw parent app. The ease of use and setup is what drew me to SeeSaw, and we currently have two schools in our district piloting it with PreK teachers. If a 4-year-old can use the app without help, it's good for any grade level.

Additionally, SeeSaw just added a blogging feature, making it almost the perfect all-in-one app for the elementary classroom. If they could throw in some Google Drive integration and a behavior management feature (a la Class Dojo), they could probably rule the world.

4. Weebly (elementary & secondary | all | website builder)

This drag-and-drop site builder is what introduced me to web design. Their free version offers a limited number of pages, but if you're simply trying to create a place to store class resources or post work, it's more than enough. The Weebly for Education account allows you to create student accounts under your own name, so for a small fee ($40/year) your students can have their own sites, blogs, etc. But if you're just creating something for you or your students are old enough to create their own accounts, the free version is plenty.

5. Quizlet (elementary & secondary | all | flashcards)

In most disciplines, the vocabulary is the discipline. It's really hard to discuss math and science concepts without the correct terminology, so simple flashcard decks from Quizlet go a long way to building a students domain-specific lexicon.

6. Socrative (elementary & secondary | all | assessment)

Anytime I use Socrative, I still get the "I can't believe this thing is free" thought in the back of my mind. Create quizzes using images, multiple choice, true/false, or open-ended questions, then just give your students your Socrative room number. When they join, they put in their name and take the quiz. You get a real-time dashboard with student results, along with a huge selection of downloadable reports in Excel, Drive or PDF formats.

If you don't have time to prepare a quiz, just launch a Quick Question or Exit Ticket and Socrative will do the work for you. I used Socrative to gather student data for action research as I worked on my Master's degree, and the amount of time it saved me with data disaggregation cannot be overstated. It's simply amazing.

7. Plickers (elementary & secondary | all | assessment)

For the teacher who only has an iPad or smartphone, Plickers should be at the top of your list. Print out free student QR codes, distribute them to the class, then ask a question. Students hold up their Plickers ("paper clickers") with the answer they chose facing up. Scan it with your phone and get instant feedback on who gets it and who still needs more help.

Plickers also recently added "Scoresheet," which lets you put in a date range and see individual reports on student performance for that time period. It also gives you an item analysis by question so you can get an idea of overall trends in your class.

8. Kahoot! (elementary & secondary | all | review & assessment)

With Kahoot!, students earn points as they answer quickly and correctly. Put in the questions you want to ask (or find another quiz that fits your criteria), launch the game, and have students join on any device using a unique PIN. After each question, students are shown the leaderboard and know their position. Now with "Ghost Mode," students can play against themselves and try to beat their best score. A tricky little way to keep kids studying...well played, Kahoot people, well played...

9. BlendSpace (elementary & secondary | all | learning playlists)

BlendSpace is a more robust version of LessonPaths. It allows you to search for resources from within the app, then drag-and-drop it into your playlist. With Blendspace, you can add PDFs, images, Google Drive files, PowerPoints, YouTube videos, links and more to create a list of resources for your students. Perfect for differentiating instruction and blending/flipping the classroom, BlendSpace also now lets you integrate. Since being acquired by TES Global in 2014, you can easily add TES resources to your playlist.

10. Autodesk (secondary | M, E | design)

Autodesk makes a huge amount of its software available for free to both teachers and students. You can download featured suites of products or individual titles. Tools like AutoCAD, Fusion 360, 3ds Max and much more are available for educators and those they serve. It's amazing that Autodesk provides these tools for free, and their uses are only limited by your imagination.

11. Symbaloo (elementary & secondary | all | social bookmarking)

Even though SymbalooEDU does have a premium version, the free one should provide you with everything you need. Symbaloo's super-cool tiling layout makes it easy to gather bookmarks, organize them, then share the link to your page with your students. You can set up differentiated lessons and resources, organize by topic, or create a homepage for your class with all your resources in one place. Symbaloo is available across devices so you always have all your bookmarks in one place.

12. LucidChart (secondary | all | mindmapping)

A diagramming web app, LucidChart allows multiple users to collaborate on exceptionally intricate mindmaps, graphic organizers, and other ways of showing relationships between ideas. With the teacher version, you get team management, as well as increased storage per team. LucidChart makes collaborating on ideas easy and makes connections clear.

Update: Dave Grow from LucidChart let me know that LucidPress, their super-easy, collaborative, drag-and-drop design software is also free for educators. Thanks, Dave!

@NKeithBlend Thanks Nicholas for including Lucidchart! By the way, have you checked out Lucidpress too? Also free for EDU.

- Dave Grow (@dmgrow) March 8, 2016

13. Thinglink (elementary & secondary | all | interactive images)

An innovative way to add text, images, movies and more to your pictures, Thinglink lets students connect their learning in one place, then share their images for others to learn from. Thinglink has almost endless possibilities, and the free Thinglink Education option lets you quickly create student accounts, organize them into classes, and creates a secure environment for them to work in. This version lets you create 1 classroom with 100 students.

14. Canvas & Schoology (elementary & secondary | all | LMS)

The end game of these free offerings is, of course, to get your district to fully buy into and purchase an LMS. But consider the fact that you can sign up for your own for FREE. That means you get all the full-fledged features of a robust LMS, plus access to their community of lessons, plans and ideas, without having to fork over a single, hard-earned dime. Pretty amazing when you think about it...

15. Classmill & Cloudschool (elementary & secondary | all | LMS-"lite")

But sometimes you don't need everything that the big guns are offering up. That's why I love options like Classmill and Cloudschool. If you only need to make one or two online courses, or you're experimenting with flipped and blended professional development, creating a course on one of these two workhorses is a great way to get started. They're incredibly easy to use, and the ability add text, video, images and more make them ideal for creating simple courses or housing resources.

16. MackinVIA (elementary & secondary | Library | electronic resource management)

I actually just learned about this today from Tina Berumen, the media specialist at Cannon Elementary in GCISD. MackinVIA is a free platform for managing all your district's ebooks and digital media in one place. You can create groups that pull together resources for student research, as well as link to any external resource you think should be included in the collection. Also, the fact that content is accessible from any device through the MackinVIA app makes it perfect for any style of technology deployment. And if you purchase digital content from Mackin, it's automatically added, tagged and ready to go. In the age of evolving libraries, a central hub like this seems to have become a necessity.

17. Padlet (elementary & secondary | all | collaborative wall)

Send your students to Padlet, tell them to double-click, and watch them start posting their thoughts. Padlet allows students to add links, videos, images and more. Create a collaborative Word Wall for a unit of study, or post images from a field trip and share the link with parents. Using Padlet's new iPad app makes it even easier for students to get mobile and explore the world outside their classroom, then organize their findings in Padlet. When you're done, export the wall as a PDF so you have copies of everyone's responses and posts.

18. GeoGuessr (secondary | SS | geography)

Drop students in the world and challenge them to figure out where they are. Using Google's StreetViews, players in this game have to use the clues around them to discover where in the world they are. When they make a guess, the closer they are, the more points they earn. GeoGuessr is an awesome way to introduce a Social Studies unit, and teachers can use it's partner GeoSettr to create custom map games for students to play. Be careful, though, it'll bring out the competitive side of even your most mild-mannered students...

19. Virtual Manipulatives (elementary | M | manipulatives)

Back in the day, teachers used overheads with transparent plastic Base-10 blocks to help students develop their understanding of place value and other concepts. With the overheads gone, it can be difficult to model for students exactly what you want them to be doing with the toy-looking objects that have just been set in front of them. This set of virtual manipulatives is an elementary teacher's dream come true. Full of backgrounds and manipulatives, teachers have quick access to ten frames, two-color counters, Base-10 blocks, algebra tiles, geoboards and much, MUCH more. Having this accessible makes life much easier when it's time to have students show their math.

20. Math Resource Sites: 3rd-5th, 6th (elementary | M | resources)

If you teach 3rd-6th grade math, you need to check these out. For full disclosure, they're sites I created for the math teachers in our district, so they're organized by Texas standards, but they're still aligned with most national ones. Search for tutorial videos, resources, activities and lesson plans all grouped by standard, and cut your lesson planning time down to a minimum. It's worth taking a few minutes and looking around.

21. Watchkin/Viewpure/SafeShare (elementary & secondary | all | YouTube purification)

Every teacher knows the tragedy of pulling up an innocent video on YouTube, only to be shocked and horrified by the ads, comments, pre-roll commercial or suggested videos that surround it. These three tools remove all that, making it safe to use YouTube in your classroom again. As a side note, if YouTube is blocked in your district, sometimes one of these will get around that for you...

22. Open eBooks (elementary & secondary | R | free eBooks)

If you are a teacher in a Title 1 school or a teacher of Special Education students in any school, the Open eBooks app (a partnership with 10 publishers, First Book and the White House) has made an incredible library of books available to your students for free. Here's a video on how to sign up from start to finish, but the essence of it is that you get class codes for each one of your students and when they download the Open eBooks app, all they do is enter the code to start reading. This is an amazing step toward making high quality reading material available to underprivileged students, and definitely should be incorporated into all qualifying classrooms.

23. PicMonkey\BeFunky (elementary & secondary | all | photo editing)

Photo editing, collages, and tasteful effects used to be limited to the qualified few with darkrooms, then the ones with superpowerful computers. Now, these web-based tools make it easy for anyone to create using images. Simply upload, then explore effects, overlays, text options and more. Get students creating pictures that represent a story, or adding their own commentary to photos of current events. These tools make it easy to look like a pro.

24. MoveNote (elementary & secondary | all | presentation)

(Update: MoveNote is no longer free. Boo. But it's still worth taking at least a passing glance at to see if your students would benefit from the paid version.) MoveNote is beautiful because of its simplicity. Take anything from your Google Drive or computer, upload it, then record yourself presenting. Share a link with someone or submit it through Google Classroom, and you can communicate with anyone, anywhere. MoveNote is great for getting students to explain their thinking and though process, as well as work on those oh-so-important soft skills like speaking clearly and slowly when presenting.

25. DarkCopy (elementary & secondary | R | distraction-free writing)

Sometimes you just need a distraction-free place to write. No ads, no titles, no overwhelming toolbars full of options - just a blank screen. Part of the Zenware movement, DarkCopy is simply a calm place to write. When students blog or journal, using DarkCopy and then copy/pasting into whatever format they'll use to turn in can be a great way to get them to focus on the words instead of changing fonts, colors and formatting.

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55 #Edtech Tools I STILL Can't Believe Are Free | #30DBB Day 8

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This is day 8 of "The 30 Day Blog Binge." Learn more I was told a few days ago that my partner and I have money written into our department's budget for blended learning. As I processed this information, I realized something: I have no idea how to spend money.

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http://texasedtech.blogspot.com/2016/03/30dbb-day-8-55-edtech-tools-i-still.html?utm_content=bufferad153&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

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https://info.steelcase.com/alc-grant-application-and-promo-video

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Technology that works seamlessly across devices and platforms. I.e. Compatibility, sound. Not having to feel like I'm working around the technology to do things with students.

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It is very important for kids to have a variety of platforms to demonstrate their knowledge. They first need exposure to a variety of apps/programs and then the opportunity to choose how they demonstrate their learning.

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It is very important for kids to have a variety of platforms to demonstrate their knowledge. They first need exposure to a variety of apps/programs and then the opportunity to choose how they demonstrate their learning.

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- Amy Piacenza

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Students struggling with phonics could benefit greatly from the Earobics program- Earobics Step 1 Home Version Windows and Mac Os X Compatible Cd-rom...We used to run it with cds and it doesn't seem to be available online. Also, the Lexia Phonics program was great too as a cd...Lexia Reading Core5..if we could run these on cds that would be great....thank YOU!

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Students struggling with phonics could benefit greatly from the Earobics program- Earobics Step 1 Home Version Windows and Mac Os X Compatible Cd-rom...We used to run it with cds and it doesn't seem to be available online. Also, the Lexia Phonics program was great too as a cd...Lexia Reading Core5..if we could run these on cds that would be great....thank YOU!

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Skype an expert (or an old friend-me!) Video conferencing is choppy and sometimes not available