While ISTE’s annual conference is the place that all of the big ed tech companies showcase their new developments for the coming year, AASL’s annual conference is featuring best apps and websites for teaching and learning. The American Association of School Librarians annual conference was held over the weekend and that’s when they revealed their lists of best apps and best websites for teaching and learning in 2019.

Many of the apps and websites on AASL’s best of 2019 lists are apps and sites that I’ve previously reviewed and or created tutorials about. The apps and sites that I’ve reviewed that made the AASL’s lists are featured below. You can find AASL’s full list of best apps here and best websites here.

Best Apps for Teaching & Learning
ChatterPix Kids is a free app (Android version here, iPad version here) that students can use to create talking pictures. Students open the app, snap a picture or import a picture, draw a face on the picture, and then record themselves talking for up to thirty seconds. I’ve used this app with students as young as first grade, but my favorite example of using ChatterPix Kids is found in this video made by Kindergarten students with a little help from their teacher.

iCell, produced by the Hudson Alpha Institute for Biotechnology, is an app that high school biology teachers and their students should check out. The app provides students with 3D models of plant, animal, and bacteria cells. Each cell model can be viewed in detail by zooming in and rotating the model on your iPad. Students can learn about the parts of the cells by tapping on them to reveal their labels and a brief description of that part’s function. Click here for the iPad version. Click here for the Android version.

Sites in VR is a free Android and iOS app that provides a 1700 virtual reality views of significant landmarks around the world. The app is a good one for those who would like to experience a bit of virtual reality without having to use a virtual reality headset. Sites in VR provides imagery that you can navigate through by moving your phone or tablet in a manner similar to that of using a virtual reality viewer like Google Cardboard.

Stop Motion Studio is a great app for creating stop motion videos. The app is available for iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac operating systems. The basic (free) version of Stop Motion Studio lets you take as many pictures as you like and string them together in a sequence that plays back at a frame-per-second rate of your choosing. Each frame can be edited individually before you produce the final video. You can also add narration to your video in the basic version of the app. Completed projects can be saved to your device and from there you can share them on YouTube or on your favorite social network.

PBS Kids ScratchJr is a PBS Kids-themed version of the popular ScratchJr app. PBS Kids ScratchJr is available as a free iPad app and as a free Android app. The app is designed to help five to eight year old students learn basic programming concepts through a drag-and-drop interface. Just like the ScratchJr app, on PBS Kids ScratchJr students program a story or game by selecting background settings and characters for each frame of the story. Then in each frame students select the actions that they want their characters to take. Students snap programming pieces together to make characters move and talk in their stories and games.

Tynker made AASL’s list of best apps for teaching and learning. It can be used by students to learn programming skills on their iPads. But it is also available to use in your web browser. The web browser version offers far more functions and features. Click here for my overview of Tynker.

Wolfram Alpha also made AASL’s list of best apps for teaching and learning. The app provides much of the same functions that the web version of Wolfram Alpha provides. Over the years I’ve written many articles about using Wolfram Alpha for a variety of purposes including making comparisons, using it in Google Docs, creating strong passwords, and for help in solving mathematics problems.

Best Websites for Teaching & Learning
Anchor.fm is a free podcast recording, editing, and publishing tool. One of the things that I love about Anchor is that you can quickly publish your podcast to all major podcasting platforms with just one click. Anchor removes all of the technical set-up steps that are typically associated with publishing a podcast. Watch my tutorial below to learn how to get started using Anchor.fm to create a podcast.

Brush Ninja was one of my favorite discoveries last summer. Since then I have been showing it off to anyone who will listen. I included it in my best of the web presentation at TXLA and in a recent workshop on formative assessment. Brush Ninja is a free service for creating animated GIFs that you can then include in slides and videos. Last fall I used with 8th grade science students. You can read about that experience here.

Edpuzzle is a free service for creating video-based lessons or “flipped” lessons. It’s a service that has been around for many years and continues to grow and improve. Earlier this year I published the following tutorial on how to use Edpuzzle to create video-based lessons with videos that you find online or with videos that you have stored on your computer.

Explore.org is another website that has been around for many years yet still made AASL’s list of best sites for teaching and learning. That just goes to show how good Explore.org is as a resource for students. One of the many features of the site is network of live nature webcams. he way that I recommend using Explore.org’s webcam streams is to have students pick an animal or animals that they want to watch grow over the course of a few weeks. Have them watch for a few minutes a day and record observations in an online or physical journal. The Google Science Journal app could be a good option for writing those observations.

GeoGuessr is a fun and challenging geography game based on Google’s Street View imagery. The game presents players with imagery of a location in Street View and the player then has to guess where where in the world that place is. Some challenges are easier than others, but none are actually easy. To guess correctly players need to study the imagery for little clues that tip-off the location. I’ve been using GeoGuessr since 2014 when I wrote about using it to spark inquiry about geography.

Google’s VR Tour Creator is one of my favorite new tools of the last year. AASL seems to agree with me because it is on their list of Best Websites for Teaching & Learning 2019. I’ve made a series of tutorials on how to use Tour Creator. You can watch those tutorials here.

Knight Lab at Northwestern University produces some of my favorite digital tools for social studies students. Among the many tools that Knight Lab offers you will find Timeline JS for making multimedia timelines, Juxtapose for making comparisons of images, and Storyline JS for making interactive charts. The versatility of the Knight Lab tools is probably a contributing factor to it landing on the AASL’s list of best sites for teaching and learning.

Thunkable is a free service for creating your own iOS and Android apps. It’s one of the four tools that I frequently recommend to teachers who want their students to try app development.

Wakelet has stormed onto the ed tech landscape over the last year. It’s quickly become a popular service for bookmarking, sharing bookmarks, and note-taking.

Thanks to Kathy Ishizuka for her School Library Journal article about AASL’s new lists.