Digital Learning

Report: Students Used 74 Different Ed Tech Tools in Fall 2021 Semester, Educators Used 86

• By Kristal Kuykendall
• 04/12/22

LearnPlatform today released a mid-year ed tech usage report showing that K–12 students in U.S. school districts used 74 different digital learning tools during the first half of the current school year, and educators used 86.

The company’s annual “EdTech Top 40” report ranks the most-accessed digital education products, tools, and resources; the mid-year report released today includes a new analysis of ed tech usage by more than 2 million K–12 students and 225,000 teachers, between Aug. 1 and Dec. 31, 2021, LearnPlatform said.

School districts accessed an average of 1,403 ed tech products per month, about the same total reported during the 2020-21 school year, the report noted.

LearnPlatform CEO Karl Rectanus noted that having to learn how to use scores of different technology tools in the course of one school semester might seem overwhelming to the average student or teacher.

“It leads to questions about whether students and teachers benefit from this variety and whether they can easily access and be proficient on this number of tools,” he said. “While there may be no ‘right number of tools,’ everyone should want to know whether the tools they are investing in are actually leading to the desired outcomes.”

The Top Ed Tech Solutions: Highlights

Holding the top five spots on the most-often-used list are Google products, the same as last year’s report: Google Docs, Google Slides, YouTube, Google Drive, and Google Forms. Google Classroom (No. 8) and Google Sites (No. 9) fell slightly in their rankings.

Also in the Top 10 were No. 6 Kahoot, up slightly from a year ago, and Clever, up five spots, LearnPlatform said.

As expected with the widespread return to in-person learning, Zoom and Google Meet dropped significantly to No. 20 and No. 21, respectively.

Tools categorized as solutions for Classroom Engagement & Instruction comprised the largest chunk of the top 40 list. Three Classroom Engagement & Instruction products with significant increases in usage were Blooket (up 21 places to No. 15); Edpuzzle (up 8 positions to No. 25); and Prodigy (up 12 positions at No. 19).

New to the Top 40 list are learning management system Schoology (No. 22); i-Ready (No. 32), Grammarly (No. 39) and McGraw-Hill Education (No. 40).

View the full report LearnPlatform.com/top40.