Top 5 Free Productivity Tools for Teachers in 2025
If there is one resource teachers are constantly running short on, it is time. Between grading, lesson planning, and parent communication, the administrative workload can feel overwhelming. While there are thousands of “free” tools out there, many are just glorified free trials that hit you with a paywall after three days.
We have curated a list of 5 top-tier productivity tools that offer genuine value. Most of these options provide recurring monthly free usage, meaning they refresh their credits or limits every month so you can keep using them throughout the school year without pulling out your credit card.
Here are the tools that will save you hours this week.
1. Slides Translator (by Automagical Apps)
In increasingly diverse classrooms, bridging language barriers is a daily necessity. Slides Translator by Automagical Apps is a must-have add-on for Google Slides that allows you to translate entire presentations—including text boxes and speaker notes— to a different language in seconds.
❤️ Why Teachers Love It
- One-Click Translation: It preserves your original slide formatting while changing the language, saving you from re-designing your deck.
- Voice Typing: You can dictate text directly into your slides in over 60 languages.
- Visual Translation: It can even translate text trapped inside images on your slides.
The Free Scoop
Unlike many translation tools that charge per word immediately, Slides Translator offers a generous recurring monthly free tier. Users typically receive a set allowance of free slide translations (e.g., up to 100 slides) that refreshes every month. This makes it a sustainable option for teachers who need to translate a few lessons or parent presentations periodically throughout the year.
2. Brisk Teaching
Brisk Teaching is a Chrome extension that lives as an overlay on the tools you already use, like Google Docs, Slides, and Canvas. It acts as an AI co-pilot designed specifically to speed up grading and resource creation.
❤️ Why Teachers Love It
- Targeted Feedback: Brisk can read a student’s Google Doc and generate personalized feedback based on your rubric, which you can insert as comments with one click.
- Give it a Level: You can instantly change the reading level of a news article or document to suit different learners.
- Inspect Writing: It allows you to replay the version history of a Google Doc to see the student’s writing process, which is helpful for verifying authenticity.
The Free Scoop
Brisk offers a “Free Forever” plan for educators. While they have school-wide paid plans, the individual teacher version gives you access to over 20 core AI tools, including feedback generation and curriculum creation, with no hidden costs.
3. MagicSchool AI
MagicSchool AI has quickly become the “Swiss Army Knife” of AI for education. It helps teachers draft everything from Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) to multiple-choice quizzes, engaging lesson hooks, and rigorous project-based learning assignments.
❤️ Why Teachers Love It
- Safety First: It is FERPA and COPPA compliant, designed specifically for schools rather than general use like standard chatbots.
- Specific Tools: Instead of staring at a blank prompt box, you choose from specific generators like “Rubric Generator,” “Email Responder,” or “Text Leveler.”
- Differentiation: It excels at taking a single topic and generating materials for three different proficiency levels instantly.
The Free Scoop
MagicSchool provides a robust free tier. While there are “Plus” features, the free version includes access to their full library of tools. Crucially, usage limits are dynamic and reset monthly. This means if you use up your generations during a busy report card week, you don’t lose the tool forever—you just wait for the next month’s refresh.
4. Curipod
If you want to turn a passive slide deck into an interactive experience, Curipod is the tool to beat. It uses AI to generate interactive lessons complete with polls, word clouds, drawings, and open-ended questions that students answer on their own devices.
❤️ Why Teachers Love It
- AI Slide Generation: Type in a topic (e.g., “The Water Cycle for 5th Grade”), and Curipod builds a ready-to-teach deck with interactive checks for understanding.
- Student Engagement: It allows students to participate anonymously or by name, encouraging quiet students to share their thoughts.
- AI Feedback: The platform can provide instant, automated feedback on student written responses based on your criteria.
The Free Scoop
Curipod’s free plan is exceptionally generous regarding student access. It allows for unlimited participants (students) and unlimited presentations. While there are monthly limits on specific advanced AI features (like translator credits), the core interactive teaching functionality remains free and resets monthly.
5. Automagical Forms
Automagical Forms is legendary among teachers for a reason. It solves one of the most tedious problems in education: typing up questions from an old PDF or worksheet into a digital format.
❤️ Why Teachers Love It
- Magic Conversion: You click on a PDF or Google Doc in your Drive, and it “automagically” identifies the questions.
- Instant Quizzes: With a single click, it converts those questions into a graded Google Form quiz, saving you hours of manual data entry.
- Handwriting Recognition: It is powerful enough to read questions even from photos of worksheets.
- Answer Detection: If there’s an answer key that is uploaded, it will automatically find the answers
The Free Scoop
Note: This tool is the exception to the “recurring” rule but is too valuable to exclude.
Automagical Forms typically operates on a “freemium” model where the free tier is more of a trial or has very strict limits on the number of files you can process for free. However, for that one emergency week where you need to digitize a massive exam, it is worth using your free credits. For heavy users, it is often considered the one tool worth paying for out of pocket.
Honorable Mention: Automagical Nudge
Automagical Nudge is a Gmail add-on that ensures you never drop the ball on a parent email or admin request again. It lives directly in your inbox sidebar and helps you manage follow-ups without the mental load.
❤️ Why It’s a Lifesaver
We have all had that moment where we send an email to a parent or colleague and forget to check if they replied. Nudge allows you to:
- Set Reminders: “Remind me about this email in 3 days if I haven’t received a reply.”
- Follow-up Sequences: Schedule a polite follow-up email to send automatically if the person doesn’t respond.
- Inbox Monitor: It highlights emails you may have missed or forgotten to reply to.
The Free Scoop
This tool offers a great Free-for-Life plan. It includes a recurring monthly quota of automated emails and AI credits (which help you write the emails). These credits refresh every month, making it a perfect permanent addition to your email workflow.
