27 Quick Win, Low-Prep Ways to Integrate Tech This Year

I work with teachers every day. You all don’t need more to do. You need ideas that just work. Between planning, grading, and juggling a hundred plus daily decisions, finding time to integrate new tech into your classroom can feel unrealistic. I hear you. But meaningful tech integration doesn’t have to be (and shouldn’t be) complicated. The best tools fit naturally into what you already do—helping students think, create, and connect with ease.

This curated collection is all about quick wins: teacher-tested, student-facing activities inspired by real classrooms. Each activity is easy to set up and uses free or familiar tools. Whether it’s a collaborative Padlet, a Canva creation, or an AI-powered reflection, these ideas keep curiosity high and prep low so you can spend more time teaching and less time troubleshooting.

Making time to try new technology can be tricky, especially early in the year. I find it easier to wait until you’ve found your groove and know your students better—usually a couple months in. Look for natural opportunities: days with testing, class parties, or pep rallies when routines are already off (plus we’ve all had those moments when kids fly through your plans faster than expected). That’s a perfect time to try some low-prep tech.

QUICK STARTS FOR THE DAY

Send Students on a Search: Ask a question connected to your lesson and challenge students to find the answer using their browser. The key is crafting questions that require more than a simple copy-and-paste into a search engine to answer—something that makes them think about how they’re searching.

For example, you might ask, “What’s one real-world example of cause and effect?” or “Find a recent news headline that connects to our topic today.” Keep a timer handy to control the duration of the activity. Once they’ve found an answer, ask them to share how they searched and how they determined their source was reliable.

Cultivate Creativity With AI Images: Using a Padlet board, have students generate and post an AI image based on your upcoming topic. It could be a visual of a vocabulary word or an image that captures the “mood” of today’s lesson. Once posted, classmates can add captions to each other’s images.

Hook Curiosity With a Custom Song: Use Suno to create a surprise, AI-generated tune that hints at today’s concept, essential question, or theme, and play it as students enter the room. Ask them to listen for key words or clues about what they’ll be learning. You can make the song ahead of time or create it live for a “wow” moment.

Check In with Emojis: Have students open a Google Doc, Slide, Note, or PowerPoint and choose an emoji that matches how they feel, how confident they are about yesterday’s topic, or what they predict today’s lesson will be about. A quick glance across screens gives you instant feedback, and students appreciate having a low-stakes way to express themselves.

CHECKS FOR UNDERSTANDING

Make a Mystery Mic Drop Moment: Have students type a one-sentence summary of their learning into Padlet’s AI Voice tool, which reads their words aloud as an audio post. Turn on “Hide Author” so names stay anonymous, then let classmates listen and vote for their favorites using the five-star reaction setting.

Challenge Students to Spot the Lie: Ask students to post two true statements and a false one about what they’ve learned so far on a shared Padlet board. Classmates use the “like” reaction to guess which statement is the lie before the authors reveal the answer.

Plot a Timeline in Ten: Create a timeline board in Padlet and have students work in small groups to map out key events. It could be moments in history, steps in a process, or scenes in a story they’re reading. Each group member adds their own posts to build the timeline, then compares theirs with another group. Did they include the same events? Put things in a different order?

Drive Deeper Discussion: Use Wayground Presentations (formerly Quizizz) to get instant feedback from students during your lesson. Upload your slides and add built-in polls or word cloud questions as you go. Students respond from their devices, and their answers instantly appear on the screen for everyone to see. You can even switch to a collaborative whiteboard with one click to extend the discussion or capture new ideas together.

COLLABORATION AND DISCUSSION

Co-Write Creative Stories: Bring storytelling to life with a collaborative Padlet board. Set the board to “columns,” write the first post to kick things off, and let students jump in to continue the story by adding comments or new sections. As the posts grow, so does the class story—one twist and turn at a time. Use the built-in AI Image generator to add illustrations to enrich the story. By the end, you’ll have a creative piece built by every student’s imagination.

Take a Collaboration to the Next Level: Canva’s digital whiteboard gives students an open space to think, plan, and create together. Start with a ready-made template or a blank canvas and have groups co-create something visual, like a character map for a novel, a concept web for a science unit, or a class brainstorm before starting a project. Canva’s library of free elements, graphics, and fonts allows students to express themselves with ease.

Build a Collaborative Graffiti Wall: Use one of the ready-to-go Padlet sandbox templates and set up a collaborative “graffiti wall” where students can post ideas, questions, or visuals around a topic. It’s a creative space for brainstorming, sharing reactions, or showing what they know. You can use it as a warm-up, a mid-lesson check, or a closing reflection.

Create a Top 5 (or Flop 5) List: Create a Padlet board and have students post their ideas for a “Top 5” list—like the top five events in a story, top five ways to solve a scientific problem, or even a flop five list of the biggest mistakes made by a historical figure. Use the “vote” reaction so students can like their favorites.

WRITING AND CREATION

Boost Student Brainstorming Visually: Since Freeform is already on iPads and Macs, there’s no login or setup—just open it and start creating. Students can use Freeform to build sketchnotes or visual study guides to prepare for a quiz or project. With drawing tools, sticky notes, and shapes, students can organize ideas in ways that make sense to them.

Animate Student Thinking: Students can use Line Draw in Keynote to turn sketches or diagrams into short animations that reveal their thinking step by step. In science, they might draw and animate the steps of the water cycle or the process of photosynthesis. In ELA, they could illustrate how a story’s plot unfolds.

Expand Student Planning: Google Draw gives students a simple, shared space to plan and organize ideas together. It’s ideal for building digital storyboards, mind maps, or flowcharts as part of a group project. Students might also plan the scenes for a short film, outline the steps in a science experiment, or map out the key events in a novel. Because it’s part of Google Workspace, everyone can edit, comment, and build together in real time.

Provide Individualized Writing Feedback: With MagicSchool AI, you can set up a customized writing feedback tool that scores student work and provides specific, individualized, and actionable suggestions for improvement. The real power of this tool comes from your setup, because strong prompts and clear rubrics help the AI give feedback that feels personal and useful.

Design Animated Flashcards: Students can design animated flashcards in Canva, creating a slide for each vocabulary word or concept and then adding text, images, and animations with the “Create an Animation” feature. For example, a world language class might create flashcards that show verbs in action with simple movements or images that demonstrate meaning.

Quote Something Meaningful: Students search for a “quote template” in Canva and choose a meaningful quote from a text, lesson, or discussion, then pair it with visuals, color, and typography that reflect its tone or message. For example, a student reading The Giver might design a slide with a key line about memory and use muted colors and symbolic imagery to capture the book’s mood.

SEL SUPPORT

Break Tasks into Manageable Steps: Starting a project-based learning assignment can be overwhelming for students, especially when there are lots of moving parts. At the start of a PBL unit, Goblin.tools’ Compiler helps break large projects into smaller, more manageable steps. Help students to stay organized, manage their time (and stress), and see their progress as they move through a big assignment. 

Build a Gratitude Wall: Gratitude helps students slow down and notice the good around them. With Padlet’s ready-made Gratitude Wall templates, you can launch a classwide gratitude activity or a private reflection board in minutes. Students can post short messages, images, or GIFs to show appreciation for classmates, teachers, or reflect on simple moments from the week.

Ask “How Are We Feeling?”: Sometimes students just need a moment to name what they’re feeling before they can focus and dive into learning. Canva has ready-to-use “How Are We Feeling” slide templates that make daily emotional check-ins quick and meaningful. Project one at the start of class or share it digitally for students to respond privately.

Quiet and Calm the Room: When energy runs high or focus starts to fade, try the Typing Zen activity on Classroom Zen, where students practice typing encouraging phrases. It’s calming, skill-building, and just the right mix of mindfulness and movement.

Build Conversational Confidence: Give ELL students a safe space to grow their skills with Magic School’s Language Practice Room template. Students can explore conversation simulations, practice audio and visual comprehension, and even record spoken responses using the built-in microphone. It’s a low-stakes, supportive environment where students can strengthen fluency, build confidence, and take risks with language without the pressure of a live audience.

REFLECTION & EXIT TICKETS

Challenge Students to “Be the Bot”: From Matt Miller at Ditch That Textbook: Open an AI tool and ask students to predict what it will say when given a question related to your lesson. Students identify vocabulary and concepts that should appear in the response and point out what the AI might miss. It’s an engaging way to review content while showing that AI doesn’t know everything (and that our human thinking still matters most).

Set the Mood(Board): In a shared Canva presentation, give each student a slide to build their own “lesson mood board.” They can fill it with images, colors, and text that capture what they learned, how they felt about the topic, or what ideas stood out most. The finished deck becomes a gallery of learning moments you can scroll through together or revisit later in the unit.

Reverse Engineer an Exit Ticket: Instead of answering your question, have students write their own. They can post a question they’re still wondering about or something they’d ask a classmate to check their comprehension. Using a Padlet board (or your Schoology or Canvas LMS discussion board) lets everyone see and respond to each other’s ideas, turning reflection into a quick peer learning moment instead of a one-way check-out. Level up the responses by adding your own responses and probing questions to posts alongside the students.

Take Five-Minutes to Reflect: Using Canva, have students choose a simple infographic template and fill it with key ideas, examples, or takeaways from the day’s lesson. They can add icons, short captions, or visuals to show what stood out most. Keep it fast by setting a five-minute timer and challenging them to capture the heart of the lesson in one graphic.