Your students rely on the internet for everything from chatting with their friends to finding help with their homework. It’s time that teachers became as web-savvy as their students, and you can start by checking out these ten essential web tools for teachers.

1. TeacherTube began because educators saw the potential of YouTube to be a great educational resource. But YouTube makes it difficult for teachers to find educational material in the midst of entertainment. TeacherTube specializes in educational videos for classroom use.

2. Curriki is a great teacher-driven resource for educators looking for inspiration for lesson plans and activities. Educators from around the world submit innovative lesson plans, worksheets, activity ideas, and discuss teaching methods on the website’s blog.

3. School Rack is a free site that teachers can use to create educational blogs or class websites for students. You can hold online discussions, report grades online, share documents, and post a calendar of assignments and due dates.

4. Footnote is a database of over 64,000,000 historical images that can be used and shared by anyone.  It’s the perfect place to find primary sources for history classes, or just help to bring history to life for your students through original letters and images from a variety of periods.

5. DOC Cop is a website that makes it easy to find out whether your students’ work is original or plagiarized. Sure, you can type suspicious sentences into Google, but Doc Cop is easier, and free. Doc Cop emails you a report of how much of the document has been copied and where the original text came from.

6. WriteCheck isn’t just another plagiarism detector, it’s more like an originality detector. Made by the creators of Turnitin.com, WriteCheck is supposed to help students learn to check their own work for citations. Potentially plagiarized material is highlighted, allowing students to know what may need citations and helping teachers detect copied work.

7. Shmoop’s literary summaries are very funny and pack in all the information your students need, with the humor you need to get them to pay attention in class. Think of them as teaching aids, like Cliff’s Notes, but wittier. Shmoop also has resources for history, civics, music and AP exams.

8. QuizStar is an online tool to help teachers create quizzes for students to take online. You can even create multilingual quizzes and attach multimedia files to questions.

9. Google News Alert helps teachers, and anyone, keep informed of daily news stories. If you’re teaching your students about current events, this is especially useful. Just search for the issue you want to cover and related stories will be sent to you.

10. Assign-a-Day is a site of teacher-created calendars to manage classes and assignments. Students won’t have any excuse to miss homework assignments when they’re all posted online.

Lesson planning implies breaking down the curriculum of a semester into daily doses to be administered to students. Having a lesson plan in place is of as much importance for teachers as it is for students. A good lesson plan will let teachers structure the learning so that they can first get a good grasp of the smaller portions of knowledge.

Lesson plans are meant to evolve regularly based on the increase in the student’s knowledge on a given topic. A good lesson plan should let the teacher evaluate the student’s progress and plan the succeeding lectures accordingly. Teachers can use lesson plans as quick reference points from time to time to get a refresher on the matter to be taught next.

Here we present five free online web apps to help with lesson planning.

1. Curriki – Curriki is a community of educators, teaching experts, and students that have come together to form a portal with free and open source curricula for grades K-12 as its central theme. Offering web-based lesson planning tools is central to the site’s objective of bringing together students and teachers from all over the world. Lesson plans are developed and contributed by members.

2. BrainHoney – BrainHoney is a suite of learning management resources which lets you develop a single lesson plan for both classroom and online lectures. You can individualize courses with the help of “pre-test” and automated remediation. This is a useful tool that lets you create plans based on a student’s success with previous learning sessions. The teacher dashboard gives you an all-round view of what to do each day and also monitor a student’s progress regarding concepts that have been mastered and those that require further studies.

3. LessonWriter – LessonWriter is a website that lets teachers create lesson plans and instructional materials from any reading passage in the English language. The application is free for teachers, the “team” and “school” packages come at a cost. The application offers a step-by-step guide to adding questions and supporting material. Once you go through the procedure you are delivered a standards-based lesson plan from the material you fed the application. The lesson plans can be individualized according to the student’s needs. Teachers save time using this application because plans are generated quickly and one can also track classes as the lessons are recorded.

4. Bubbl.us – A free mind-mapping application that is loaded with features. Teachers can use it in a number of ways not the least to give structure to their thoughts on a given subject and chart out a learning program for students. You can also brainstorm on projects and save them on to folders for later reference. You can organize your thoughts on the spot and in a prompt manner. Of course, the clarity of the final lesson plan depends entirely on you unlike other some applications that prompt and help you in coming up with a standard lesson plan. You can share the mind-maps in “read-only” or “full-access” modes.

5. Homeschool Skedtrack – The site offers a detailed online lesson planner for teachers. Schedule activities by duration, name of the course, and things to do on a given day for a given course. You can get a view of multiple activities subject-wise on the dashboard. The scheduling of activities can be individualized for each child and you can access the data that you create from anywhere in the world. A calendar of events lets you mark the important dates and track progress in completing different elements of the curriculum. You can mark and edit activities, tests, courses, reports, and do a lot more with this free web application.