This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 161 of the Cult of Pedagogy podcast.

In this episode we're going to talk about six edtech tools I think you should try in 2021.

It's hard to imagine a time in recent history when we had more distractions, more challenges, more stuff to think about.

That is way more important than technology. But as someone reminded me earlier today, the show must go on.

You still have work to do, you still have students who need an education, and the tools in this year's Teachers Guide to Tech can help.

If this is the first time you're hearing about the Teachers Guide to Tech, let me give you a quick overview.

This is what I call a digital encyclopedia basically. It's an encyclopedia of technology.

Years and years ago, I asked people who read my blog to tell me what they needed the most, and they said that they had trouble keeping track of technology.

I started with a blog post that I was going to write out a bunch of tools and put them into categories and talk about what they were good for and linked to their websites.

That grew and grew and grew and then I ended up with a big PDF. I think that first year I had maybe 150 tools listed.

That was seven this years ago. Now I have over 450 tools and I put the guide out every year. I make it super linky so that you can jump around from category to category and look at the tools.

Then there's a picture of the tool in action and a link to the website and then also a link to a video that shows the tool in action.

The goal is to just sort through everything so that you can make smart decisions about what you need as quickly as possible.

So there's sorted it into over 57 categories. There's math, there's science, there's history tools, there's presentation tools, there's audio recording tools.

This year I've got six new categories. Every year I usually add a couple of new categories.

This year the new categories are financial literacy, images and icons, keyboarding, media literacy, social justice and anti-racism and vocabulary builders.

There's also a new section about remote and hybrid learning where I have sort of pulled together the best tips that I learned this year about teaching in those situations and then also linked to the sections of the guide that I think are the most relevant.

So the other thing that I do and if you're interested in the guide it's at teachersguidedetect.com and it's fresh and ready right now and if you're listening in January I'm actually offering a really really good discount for one week only.

So go over there and see what that is.

But what I also do every year when I put the guide out is I choose six tools that I think are worth a second look basically that I think people should check out.

Sometimes they're brand new tools but more often than not they're just things that have recently come up on my radar that I don't necessarily think a lot of people know about and I try to get a variety in and things that I think are going to be useful to a lot of people.

And so that's what we're going to talk about today.

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