A Closer Look at the Guide

How did this guide come to be?

In 2014, when Cult of Pedagogy was still a new website, Jenn sent out a survey to her audience asking them what they needed help with. Many topics came up, but one that was mentioned frequently was technology, and the main complaint was that teachers were having trouble keeping up with it. Not that it was too hard, not that it was too “technical,” but that there was just so much of it, and finding the time to learn about the tools and choose the right one was impossible for busy teachers.

So she decided to write a blog post that would sort all the tech tools teachers might use into categories, with a link to each tool’s website, a description of what the tool did, and a link to a video showing the tool in use. That blog post never happened, because it quickly blew up into a much larger document, which she sold as a PDF for the first time in January of 2015. That first guide boasted an inventory of “over 100 tools” sorted into 30 categories.

Since then, a new guide has been published every January with a growing number of tools and categories. The 2024 guide contained over 750 tools and 64 categories, and those numbers continue to grow.

The first seven editions of the guide were created entirely by Jenn — this was not easy work! For the 2022 guide she brought on a fantastic team of tech experts to build the guide with her, and they have been making it happen ever since then.

In 2025 we are bringing the guide online. This will allow us to update it all year round, make it more portable, and improve its accessibility.

Who is this guide for?

Everything about this guide has been designed for educators who use technology in their work: teachers, instructional coaches, school leaders. It’s for people who work in primary grades, high school, college, and even people who homeschool. It’s for math teachers, PE teachers, special educators — any subject at all! And it’s useful no matter what level of tech expertise you have:

• If you’re a tech novice, this guide will answer the questions you may have been too shy to ask. When someone uses a term or talks about a program they’re using, you can go to our Terms section and look it up. On every page you’ll find explanations in plain, simple language — it will be like having a patient, tech-savvy friend sitting beside your computer, your phone, or your tablet.
• If you’re tech-intermediate, this guide will help you up your game. You’re probably pretty comfortable with a good handful of tools, but there may be whole categories of terms and tools you’ve never had the chance to explore. This site is your shortcut, saving you the time it would take to research new technologies and allowing you to decide quickly if a tool is worth learning, or if it’s just something you can introduce to an inspired student.
• If you’re a tech junkie, this site will enrich your work in two ways: First, it will introduce you to a few tools you may not have heard of, feeding your insatiable hunger for more tech as it further solidifies your status as a technology expert. And second, it can serve as a teaching tool, something you can use to guide others if they come to you for help.

How does the guide work?

This guide has been designed to be a filter that lets you sort through the wild mess of tech tools and quickly determine which ones are worth your time, which ones might be nice to learn later, and which ones you can ignore for now. We have gathered up hundreds of tools, sorted them into categories, provided a simple description of what the tools in each category do, and collected ideas for how they can be used in your teaching.

Most of the tools on this site have their own pages, and each one of those pages belongs to a larger category. All of the categories can be found in our Tools Directory:

From the Tools Directory, you can choose any category and be taken to that category page, where you’ll find a short discussion of how this category of tools can be best used in the classroom, followed by a list of tools in that category, which you can click on to go to the individual tool pages:

Every tool page has a link to the tool’s website, an embedded video showing the tool in action, and a link to other tools that are similar.

In the Tips section, you’ll find a collection of articles that help you explore, fine-tune, and troubleshoot your technology use:

Finally, there’s the Terms section, a glossary of over 150 technology terms: