About The Teacher Tools

The Teacher Tools is a free collection of simple, projector-friendly classroom apps and practical teaching articles. Our goal is straightforward: take the small, repetitive jobs off a teacher's plate so there is more time and energy for the part that matters — teaching.

Why we built it

Teachers spend a surprising amount of the day on logistics: choosing who answers next, sorting students into groups, arranging desks, tracking behaviour, timing activities and managing transitions. Each one is small, but together they add up to real cognitive load during the busiest hours of the day.

We wanted those jobs to be one click away, big enough to read from the back of the room, and free for everyone. So we built a set of clean, distraction-free tools that open instantly in any browser — no sign-up, no download, no clutter — and paired them with honest, practical writing about the classroom-management ideas behind them.

What you'll find here

• Random Student Picker Wheel — call on students fairly and keep everyone engaged.
• Classroom Seating Chart Maker — design a seating plan by dragging desks into place.
• Behavior Chart — a colour-coded clip chart for tracking conduct through the day.
• Good Noodles Reward Chart — celebrate kindness, effort and focus.
• Classroom Timer — a big, high-contrast countdown the whole class can see.
• Teaching resources — articles on behaviour management, seating, attention signals and more.

What we believe

• Free should mean free. Every tool and article is free to use, with no trial and no premium tier.
• Teacher time is precious. Tools should load instantly and do one job well, with nothing to learn.
• Privacy matters. The class lists you enter are stored on your own device, not on our servers. We never sell data.
• Accessibility first. Large, high-contrast designs are built to be read from the back of the room and to work on any device.

Who makes this

Kagan Aydogan

I build and run The Teacher Tools — the code, the design and the writing. I'm a student and a developer, and I want to be upfront that I am not a classroom teacher. I started this project because the free classroom tools I could find were either covered in ads, locked behind a sign-up, or too small to read from the back of a room, and building a better one seemed like a reasonable weekend problem. It turned out to be a longer one.

Being transparent about that matters, because it shapes what this site is good for. The tools are mine and I stand behind them. The articles are a different thing: they are my summary of what experienced teachers and the classroom-management literature say, written for teachers who want a practical answer quickly — not the account of someone who has run a Year 4 class through a wet Friday afternoon.

How the articles are written

Everything in the resources section is written by hand, by me. Here is the actual process, so you can judge how much weight to give it:

• I read widely before writing. Each article draws on established classroom-management writing, teacher training material and practitioner accounts, and I try to represent the mainstream view rather than the most exciting one.
• I include the criticism. Where a popular technique has well-known drawbacks, the article says so — including for our own tools. Our piece on clip charts spends most of its length on when public behaviour charts backfire, because that is the honest picture.
• Teachers correct me. A good share of what is on this site exists because someone emailed to say a tool was missing something or an article was wrong. That feedback loop is the main thing keeping these pages useful, and it is why every article ends with an invitation to get in touch.
• Articles get updated, and dated. Every article shows when it was published and last updated. If something changes or turns out to be wrong, I revise the page rather than quietly leaving it up.

If you are a teacher and something here does not match what actually happens in your room, I would genuinely rather hear it than not. Corrections get made and credited.

How we keep it free

Running a website costs money for hosting and a domain. We cover those costs with modest, clearly-labelled advertising and the kindness of teachers who choose to support us on Ko-fi. There is no paywall, and support is always optional. We keep ads off the bare tool screens themselves so they never get in the way of your lesson.

Advertising does not influence what we write. We do not accept paid placements, sponsored articles or affiliate commissions, and no advertiser has any say over the content of an article or which tools we recommend.

Explore the tools