11 best education software tools in 2025

Teaching is a challenging job that requires a lot of versatility. You have to set curriculums, grade tests, and develop outstanding communication skills — and that’s just the basics.

Before the digital age, the demands on teachers were staggering. They often worked for hours after class or had to show up at 5 a.m. to meet all of those demands, and some teachers still maintain that grueling schedule.

Fortunately, there are tons of tools to make your life easier nowadays. You can take care of grading automatically with a spreadsheet, communicate digitally, and handle or even eliminate a lot of the paperwork with software tools. 

However, it’s not enough to be only as good as teachers were 40 years ago. You can use the same technology that’s made your job easier to truly excel at it. And here’s a selection of tools to help you do just that.

General tools

There are a lot of great academic tools, but you shouldn’t overlook those for more general use.  

1. Slack

There are a number of communication tools made specifically for students and teachers. But let’s face it — nobody’s going to make a better chat tool than Slack. In fact, it would actually be easier to make Slack match your needs than to deal with the shortcomings of a non-dedicated tool.

Slack will let you divide your chat into individual rooms. That means you can talk to specific study groups or have one-on-one exchanges. You can even use it to chat with other teachers and faculty.

2. Google Calendar

This might be an obvious choice, and you’re probably using it already. Or you could be using Outlook or Apple Calendar. Whatever your preferred flavor, a good calendar app can be immensely helpful. If you’re using one of the alternatives, you may want to look deeper into Google Calendar.

Google Calendar lets you set multiple notifications so you can get reminders more than once and in different ways as the urgency changes. You can add Google Meet video conferencing to the appointment and invite others to attend. And Google Calendar meshes well with all the other Google products.

3. Google Drive

With this one, you might start calling me Captain Obvious. Google is one of the most widely used services, and almost everyone under the age of 50 has a Gmail address or at least a Google account. If you’re using services other than Google Drive to share documents and files with your students, you may want to consider switching. Google has some great complementary tools and offers the path of least resistance.

4. Trello

Trello is a project management tool that’s popular among the internet startup crowd, and that’s because it’s an incredibly versatile tool. You can use it for brainstorming and assigning projects to individuals or smaller groups. It’s also a great way to structure curriculum and anything that you have to organize and share.

5. Notion

Notion is a top-tier note-taking program. It makes taking and sharing notes as easy as anything else out there does, but it also offers dynamic data tables that work like super-powered spreadsheets. You can use Notion’s tables just like a Trello board, but they’re part of a more complete and versatile tool.

Notion offers excellent collaboration, so you can make class notes available to your students —  and they can collaborate on notes with their classmates.

6. IFTTT

IFTTT works like a universal connector for the internet. You can use it to create productivity pipelines for almost every tool on this list. For example, you can add an event to your Trello board. Then you can have IFTTT automatically sync the event with Google Calendar. And then you can have it notify your students via your Slack channel.

7. Discord

This is a good alternative to Slack. It’s not quite as rich in features, but students might respond to it a little better since it appeals to a younger audience. Discord is the de facto standard for gamer chat, and they market toward teenagers.

8. Jotform

You don’t even need paper tests anymore, thanks to online form tools like Jotform. Great for quizzes, feedback, and information gathering, Jotform is the most versatile form tool on the market. It’s also the easiest to use, and it integrates with every other product mentioned so far. You can still use something like IFTTT to connect all your tools, but you won’t even need that to connect them to Jotform.

The following tools are also great, but they don’t integrate directly, largely because they’re geared more specifically to academia.

Academic tools

The academic tools in this list are either the best of their breed or something you may not have considered using yet.

9. Khan Academy

Khan Academy is like a cheat code for teachers, providing tools to assist with delivering great educational content. It provides carefully curated learning materials for students of all ages, and their courses are gamified, making them more engaging. Their math courses are especially excellent and helpful.

10. TEDEd

Everybody knows about TED talks. They’ve set the bar pretty high for quality and for engaging education. They’re also usually very entertaining.

If you want to use TED talks as part of your curriculum, you’re in luck. TEDEd gives you the ability to browse their talks and other resources to help you spice up your lessons.

11. Prezi

If you ever want to put a room of people to sleep, nothing works better than a slideshow. And that’s unfortunate because slideshows are a great way to deliver information.

Fortunately, Prezi offers a tool that follows the slideshow format but breaks away from the boring presentation style of showing one slide after another. Prezi makes it easy to animate presentations and add photos, videos, and more.

For example, instead of a collection of Q&A-type slides, you can create a starscape where the presentation flies around to various destinations.