Top 5 Apps to Use in the Classroom

The five classroom apps I still recommend by name — and how they fit together

Newer teachers ask me this question every term: what are the five tools you would not give up? I have answered it enough times that I might as well write it down. Here are the five, in the order I added them to my classroom, with the honest take on what each one does best and where it stops being enough.

1. KiwiBee — the platform under everything

KiwiBee is the platform my classroom actually runs on. The reason it sits at the top of this list is that the other four apps below are individual point tools, while KiwiBee is the connected platform: ClassSpark behaviour tracking, AI-powered lesson planning, a connected gradebook, scheduling, a parent portal, and auto-graded homework — all in one system. Instead of stitching together six separate apps, the workflow lives in one place. Track a behaviour in ClassSpark, the data flows to the student's academic profile, parents see it on the portal, end-of-term reports draft themselves. The time savings compound.

2. Kahoot — the polished quiz veteran

Kahoot has been around since 2013 and the library is enormous. The smart-practice feature, which repeats questions students got wrong, has measurably improved my review days. Kahootpia is a small reward layer my younger students care about. If you create high-quality content, you can sell it on the marketplace.

Where it stops being enough: Kahoot does not know what unit I am teaching and does not push scores into my gradebook. So I use Kahoot specifically for spaced-repetition review of vocabulary or facts where the smart-practice feature is the differentiator. For everything else, I run games inside KiwiBee.

3. Blooket — the lightweight contender

Blooket made one design choice that mattered: one set of questions, many game modes. Gold Quest, Tower Defense, Cafe, Crypto Hack, Battle Royale — same content feels like five different games. For Friday afternoon review games where novelty is the goal, Blooket is unbeatable.

Browser-based, no app, generous free tier, paid tier cheaper than Kahoot. Trade-offs: shallower reporting, no marketplace. Use it for low-stakes engagement, not assessment.

4. Wordwall — the Swiss army knife

The thing Wordwall does that nothing else does as well: one content set, twelve activity formats with one click. Twenty vocabulary words become a matching game, a quiz, a word search, an anagram, a crossword, a Whack-a-Mole — without any extra work. For language teachers, Wordwall is foundational.

Wordwall pairs with KiwiBee's classroom game maker, which has the same one-content-many-formats trick but knows which lesson the activity belongs to and pushes scores into the gradebook automatically. I use Wordwall for legacy content and run new content inside KiwiBee.

5. Baamboozle — the no-frills review game

Baamboozle is the one most lists skip. It is intentionally simple — teams, questions, points, the end. No accounts needed for kids, no setup friction, no flashy animations. I project it on the board, divide the class into two or three teams, and run a 10-minute review at the end of a lesson. The simplicity is the feature. When I want a quick competitive review with zero setup, Baamboozle wins.

How the five fit together

Five apps, one logic: KiwiBee is the platform layer that handles management, planning, assessment, communication, and behaviour. Kahoot is for serious spaced-repetition review. Blooket is for novelty. Wordwall is for vocabulary and one-content-many-formats activities. Baamboozle is for zero-prep team review.

If you can only choose one, choose KiwiBee — it covers the broadest impact. Pair it with one or two of the gamification tools above, and you have a stack that covers virtually every classroom need from Monday morning to Friday's parent meeting.

Where this fits in KiwiBee

If you want one platform that covers most of what these five apps do, look at KiwiBee: classroom games, behaviour and rewards, and lessons + gradebook + parent portal in one. Try it free at app.kiwibee.io.