I don't know about you, but this is the time of year when I start doing that thing — you know the thing — where you open every drawer, look at every cable, and ask yourself: Did I actually use this? Was it worth it? Would I buy it again?
It's become a ritual for me. Every May or June, I take stock of what made it into the daily rotation and what sat on a shelf collecting dust. After 20-plus years in education — and more hours than I'd like to admit testing apps, gadgets, and workflows — I've gotten pretty honest with myself about what actually earns a spot in my bag.
This year felt different, though. AI tools changed the game. Some of the software I swore by last year got replaced. A couple of “budget” accessories turned out to be the MVPs. And one purchase I almost talked myself out of became the single best investment I made all year.
So I wanted to sit down and write it all out — not as a polished review, but more like a journal entry. A real look at every piece of tech I carry, use, and depend on as a middle school Digital Media teacher and content creator. The stuff that works. The stuff that didn't. And what I'd tell a colleague to buy first if they were starting from scratch.
After years of testing, tweaking, and trimming, my entire tech stack comes down to three categories and six tools:
- Productivity — The systems I use to plan, organize, and manage everything behind the scenes.
- Grading & Assessment — The tools that handle the data entry so I don't have to.
- Content Creation — How I design, record, and produce everything from graphics to podcasts to classroom video.
That's it. Three categories. Six tools. If it doesn't fit into one of these, it doesn't make the cut. Here's the full breakdown.
🖥️ Productivity
If my tech stack were a house, this is the foundation. Everything else I do — lesson planning, content creation, communication — runs through these two platforms.
Notion
I'll be honest: Notion has quietly become the most important tool in my classroom. It started as a place to organize lesson plans, but it's turned into something much bigger. It's where I build units, store resources, map out project timelines, and — this is the big one — it's become my primary AI workspace.
Between Notion AI and the ability to build custom agents right inside my workspace, I've been able to automate things that used to eat hours of my week. Need a vocabulary quiz generated from a unit? Done. Want to draft a parent email based on a student project rubric? Done. It's not replacing the teaching — it's handling the busywork so I can focus on the teaching.
If you're a teacher who's been curious about AI but doesn't know where to start, Notion is honestly the most approachable entry point I've found. You don't need to learn prompt engineering. You just need to start organizing your stuff in one place, and the AI meets you there.
🔗 Want to go deeper? Here's more from TeacherCast on Notion:
- Building a Second Brain for Your School District with Notion AI — How to build a district-wide digital knowledge system powered by Notion AI.
- Ask the Tech Coach Ep. 259: Notion for Teachers with Milo Leask — A podcast conversation exploring how teachers are using Notion to simplify their workflows.
- The Ultimate Classroom Productivity System — A step-by-step look at building a complete productivity system for your classroom.
- The Three Productivity Tools an Instructional Coach Can't Live Without — Why Notion, digital forms, and spreadsheets are the essential toolkit for every instructional coach.
Google Workspace
This one's a given for most educators, but I want to call out the two Google tools that do the heaviest lifting for me: Google Forms and Google Sites.
Google Forms is my go-to for formative assessment. Quick check-ins, exit tickets, vocabulary quizzes, self-reflections — I use them constantly. The auto-grading alone saves me more time than I can calculate at this point. And because everything lives in Google Drive, it's already connected to Classroom with zero friction.
Google Sites has become my quiet workhorse for student-facing content. Instead of printing packets or posting a wall of links in Google Classroom, I build simple sites for each unit — a landing page with embedded resources, calendars, and examples. Students bookmark it and always know where to go. It's cleaner than a shared folder and way easier to maintain than a full website.
Together, Notion handles the behind-the-scenes planning and AI-powered workflows, and Google Workspace handles the student-facing delivery. They complement each other perfectly.
🔗 More from TeacherCast on Google for Education:
- Google for Education Tips, Tutorials, and Templates — My full collection of Google Workspace posts, including deep dives on Forms, Sites, Gemini AI, and more.
- Highlights worth checking out: Unlocking Google Forms: 5 AI Features Every Educator Needs, Using Google Sites for Student Portfolios, and End-of-Year Google Forms + Gemini Playbook for Instructional Coaches.
🎁 Free Resources:
- Google Forms Resource Hub — Free templates and guides to transform how you collect data and assess learning with AI-powered Google Forms.
- Google Vids Resource Hub — Free resources for AI-powered video creation — no editing experience required.
Productivity is the backbone — but it only matters if you can actually move student work through the system efficiently. That brings us to the second pillar.
📊 Grading & Assessment
Let me be real about something: the actual teaching part of teaching? I love it. The grading? Specifically the part where I'm manually typing scores from one platform into another for 150+ students? That's the part that makes you question your life choices on a Sunday night.
That's why GradeTransferer has become one of the most important tools in my stack — and honestly one of the most underrated.
GradeTransferer
GradeTransferer is a Chrome extension that does exactly what the name says: it transfers grades from your EdTech tools directly into your gradebook. Automatically. In two clicks. No copying. No pasting. No typos. No Sunday night spreadsheet marathons.
Here's how simple it is: You open whatever platform your students submitted work in — Google Forms, Kahoot, Quizizz, Nearpod, you name it — click the GradeTransferer extension, and hit the big green “Grab Data” button. Then you open your gradebook, click the extension again, and hit “Fill Data.” That's it. Four clicks and your grades are transferred, sorted, and placed into the correct student fields. Done.
I teach Digital Media to multiple sections of middle schoolers. That means when I assign a Google Forms quiz, I'm looking at hundreds of scores that need to make it into the gradebook accurately. Before GradeTransferer, that was an hour-plus of mind-numbing data entry. Now it takes me about 90 seconds. I'm not exaggerating.
What makes it worth it:
- Works with nearly 40 EdTech platforms — Google Forms, Kahoot, Quizizz, Nearpod, Blooket, Formative, Delta Math, IXL, and dozens more. Plus it connects to major gradebooks like PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, Schoology, and Canvas.
- Eliminates typos completely — When grades are copied automatically, there's zero chance of a data entry error. No more parents emailing about a score you accidentally fat-fingered.
- Auto-sorts student data — Even if students submitted in a different order than your gradebook lists them, GradeTransferer matches everything up automatically.
- Saves up to 100 hours per year — That's not marketing fluff. When you're transferring grades for multiple classes across multiple platforms every week, those minutes add up fast.
- FERPA and COPPA compliant — GradeTransferer doesn't collect student data at all. That's not a workaround — it's a core design principle. It also holds SOPPA, SOPIPA, and state-specific DPA compliance.
If there's one tool on this list that pays for itself in the first week, it's this one. I genuinely don't know how I graded before it.
With the planning handled and the grading on autopilot, there's one category left — and it's the one that lets me actually make things.
🎨 Content Creation
Whether it's a podcast episode, instructional video for students, or a quick tutorial for a colleague, content creation has become a core part of how I teach and how I share what I've learned. The key is having tools that don't slow you down. For me, that's Riverside for professional recording and production, and Google Vids for fast, AI-powered video that anyone can make.
Riverside
I record all of my podcasts using Riverside, and it has completely changed my workflow. It's not just a recorder — it's a complete recording, editing, and publishing solution all in one platform. I use it for long-form podcast episodes, short-form video clips for social media, and even instructional videos for my students. The fact that I can do all of that without bouncing between five different apps is a game-changer.
Here's what makes Riverside stand out, especially if you're thinking about it for a school district or as a content creator:
- Studio-quality recording from your browser — Up to 4K video and uncompressed audio, recorded locally so your internet connection doesn't tank your quality. No extra software to install.
- Separate audio and video tracks — Each participant gets their own track, which makes editing cleaner and gives you way more flexibility in post-production.
- AI-powered editing — This is where it gets wild. Riverside can remove filler words, fix eye contact, correct speech by editing the transcript, and even auto-generate captions and layouts. You edit your video like a Google Doc.
- Magic Clips — The AI automatically pulls the best moments from your recording and turns them into short-form clips ready for social media. No more scrubbing through an hour of footage to find the good parts.
- AI translation and dubbing — Translate and dub your content into 30+ languages. For districts with multilingual communities, this is massive.
- Built-in podcast hosting — Publish directly to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and more without needing a separate hosting platform. It even generates transcriptions, show notes, and episode descriptions.
- Magic Audio — AI noise removal that makes any microphone sound professional. Record from a classroom, a closet, wherever — it cleans it up.
- Webinars and live streaming — Go live in full HD to LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitch simultaneously. Great for district events, PD sessions, or community town halls.
For educators and districts looking to create professional content without a production team, Riverside is honestly the closest thing to having a full studio crew behind you. I can't recommend it enough.
Google Vids
If Riverside is my power tool for podcasting and content creation, Google Vids is the everyday tool I hand to teachers and students without a second thought. It's Google's AI-powered video creator, built right into Google Drive — and it's honestly the fastest way to remove the friction of video production in a school setting.
Here's the pitch I give every teacher who tells me they “don't do video”: If you can make a Google Slides presentation, you can make a Google Vids video. It's basically Slides turned 90 degrees. You type a description of what you want — something like “Create a 3-minute video showing students how to cite sources in MLA format” — and the AI generates a complete first draft. Script, visuals, transitions, timing. All of it. In under a minute.
For students, it's even better. Instead of spending an entire class period figuring out iMovie or fighting with export settings, they can focus on the content of their project. The AI handles the production polish — stock footage, text-to-speech voiceover, automatic transitions — and the student focuses on the storytelling and the learning. That's the whole point.
What makes it work for schools:
- Zero learning curve — It lives inside Google Drive, uses drag-and-drop editing, and feels like every other Google tool your staff already knows.
- AI-generated first drafts — Describe what you want and get a complete video draft in seconds. Customize from there.
- Text-to-speech voiceover — Students and teachers can use natural-sounding AI voices or record their own. Great for accessibility and for students who are camera-shy.
- Stock footage library — Thousands of royalty-free clips and images searchable right inside the tool. No more hunting for Creative Commons media.
- Templates for common use cases — Tutorials, announcements, onboarding videos, project presentations — there's a starting point for everything.
I've watched students who used to dread video projects light up when they realize they can produce something professional-looking in 20 minutes. And for teachers, it means you can create a quick PD tutorial or a flipped classroom video during a planning period instead of blocking off an entire afternoon. That's a real shift.
🔗 More from TeacherCast on Content Creation:
- Google Vids for Teachers: The AI Video Tool Every Instructional Coach Needs — A complete guide to getting started with Google Vids, including use cases for coaches, teachers, and administrators.
- Live Streaming Recommendations for Educators — A podcast episode breaking down my recording and live streaming setup, including how I use Riverside.
👉 The Bottom Line
That's the stack. Three categories. A handful of tools in each. Nothing fancy, nothing I don't actually use.
If I had to start from scratch tomorrow and could only pick one tool from each category, here's what I'd grab first:
- Productivity: Notion. It does too much too well to start anywhere else.
- Grading: GradeTransferer. The ROI on time saved is immediate and obvious.
- Content Creation: Google Vids. It's free, it's already in your Google Drive, and it removes every barrier to making video.
The truth is, the best tech stack isn't the most expensive one or the one with the most tools. It's the one you actually use — every day, without thinking about it. These are the tools that survived my end-of-year audit. Everything else got cut.
If you're doing your own tech stack inventory this summer, I hope this gives you a starting point. And if you're already using any of these tools, I'd love to hear how — drop a comment or reach out. The best recommendations I've ever gotten have come from other teachers who were honest about what worked and what didn't.
Here's to a productive summer and an even better fall. 🍎
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