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Six weeks into my first term I stood in front of Year 8 and watched a beautiful, thirty-slide, animated presentation refuse to open. I had no backup. I had no plan. I had a laminated seating chart and twenty-nine children who could smell blood.
That afternoon somebody in the staffroom showed me a free website with a timer and a random name picker on it, and it fixed more problems in my classroom over the next month than the entire two-day digital learning course I’d sat through in September.
So this list is not the list from the CPD deck. These are the five things I’d put in a new teacher’s hands on day one, each of them solving a problem you will definitely have, with an honest note on where each one lets you down. There’s also a short section on what I’d ignore, because nobody tells you that part.
1. A classroom screen tool, for the things you didn’t know you needed
The category name is unhelpful, so here’s what it actually does. You open a browser tab on the projector and you get a countdown timer, a random name picker, a noise-level meter, a QR code generator, a traffic light, and a text box for the task.
Classroomscreen is the one I use and it’s free for the basics. It sounds trivial. It is not trivial, for one reason: it moves your instructions off your voice and onto the wall. A visible five-minute timer ends the argument about how long is left. A named task on screen means you say it once, not eleven times. Random name pickers stop you unconsciously asking the same six confident children everything, which I was absolutely doing and would have sworn I wasn’t.
Where it lets you down: the noise meter is a gimmick and children learn to game it within a fortnight. Mine treated it as a high score table. Use the timer, ignore the microphone.
2. A design tool, so your resources stop looking like 2004
Canva has a free education tier for verified teachers, and it is the single biggest reduction in effort per unit of professional-looking output I’ve found. Worksheets, knowledge organisers, display boards, seating plans, the newsletter your head of year asks for on a Thursday afternoon.
The honest warning is bigger than the recommendation. This thing is a time sink of remarkable depth. I once spent two hours on a knowledge organiser about the water cycle. Two hours. The children looked at it for four minutes and one of them asked why the font was like that.
The rule I now follow: templates only, twenty minutes maximum, and if I’m choosing between two shades of blue I have already lost. Content first, always. A plain worksheet that teaches well beats a gorgeous one that doesn’t.
3. A retrieval-practice quizzing tool, used carefully
Quizizz, Blooket, Kahoot, Gimkit – the differences matter less than people claim. All of them let you build a set of questions once and reuse it for years, which is the actual benefit. Retrieval practice is one of the few things in education research with genuinely strong evidence behind it, and these tools make the low-stakes, high-frequency version of it survivable in a classroom of thirty.
My mistake, in case it saves you a lesson: I ran Blooket with a Year 7 class and chose a game mode where they collect little creatures. They were completely engaged. They were also, I realised about eleven minutes in, engaged entirely with the creatures. Several of them were deliberately answering fast and wrong because it was faster. I had gamified my way to zero learning.
What works better: short, boring modes. No leaderboards on the wall for anything you actually want them to think hard about. And keep the question sets narrow – twelve well-chosen questions on last week’s content beats fifty on the whole term.
4. A levelled digital reading library, if you have EAL learners or teach English
This is the most situational item on the list, so skip it if you teach secondary maths.
If you have children in your class learning in a language that isn’t their first, or you teach primary literacy, the problem you will run into is not motivation. It’s pitch. You will hand a child a book, they will go quiet and disengage, and you will write “reluctant reader” in your notes when what actually happened is the text was two levels above them and they were decoding rather than reading.
A levelled digital library solves the bit you can’t eyeball. BOOKR Class teaching app is one built for exactly this: animated storybooks with native-speaker narration, sorted by CEFR level, with a placement test so the matching isn’t guesswork, plus a teacher view showing who read what and where they stalled. For a new teacher with six reading levels in one class and no time to assess them individually, that placement data is the useful part rather than the animations.
Where it lets you down: it’s a paid school subscription, so it isn’t a thing you can quietly start using on a Tuesday. You’d need to raise it with whoever holds the budget, and I would not do that in your first term unless someone senior has already asked. Ask whether your school already has something similar first, because a surprising number do and nobody tells the new staff. Storyline Online and your local library’s digital catalogue are free places to start, and worth exhausting before anyone spends anything.
5. Somewhere to write down what happened, which nobody will suggest to you
The least exciting item and the one I’d fight to keep. Any notes app. Mine is a single running document, one line per lesson, written in the four minutes between the bell and the next class.
What went wrong. What I said that worked. Which child had a bad morning. The thing I’d do differently.
Two reasons this matters more than any of the above. First, you will teach this unit again next year, and next-year-you will have forgotten everything except a vague sense that lesson four was bad. Second, when your mentor asks how it’s going, “fine” is what you say when you can’t remember, and specifics are what get you actual help. Mine noticed a pattern in my notes about last-period Fridays that I hadn’t seen myself.
It also functions as evidence when you need it – for progress reviews, for a difficult conversation with a parent, for the moment you need to demonstrate that a problem started in October and you flagged it.
What I’d ignore in your first year
There is a lot of it, and the pressure to be seen using technology is real. My honest list of things that cost me time and gave me nothing:
- Interactive whiteboard features beyond writing on it. The drag-and-drop activities take forty minutes to build and ninety seconds to complete.
- Any tool that requires all thirty children to log in for the first time during a lesson you need to teach. Budget a full lesson for the first login, or don’t start.
- AI marking of anything that matters. It is fine for multiple choice, which you didn’t need help with. For extended writing, reading the work is the bit where you learn what to teach next, so outsourcing it defeats the purpose.
- Building your own resources from scratch when your department already has a shared drive. I did this out of pride. It cost me most of a half term.
How to introduce something new without it going badly
Four things, learned the hard way:
- Try it yourself twice before it meets children. Not once.
- Introduce it with your kindest class, on a Friday, on something low-stakes.
- Have a paper version ready. The wifi will fail. It will fail on the day you are observed.
- One new tool per half term. That’s it. A tool you use fluently beats four you’re fumbling with, and the fumbling is what the children remember.
The presentation that wouldn’t open, by the way, was on the causes of the English Civil War. I ended up drawing the whole thing on the whiteboard while narrating it badly, and two of them told me afterwards it was the best lesson I’d taught. I have thought about that more than is probably healthy.
