Six 'Revolutionary' Teacher Web Tools that One Day Just Went Away

'This is why we can't have nice things, darlin'

If there are two things I’ve learned over the past twenty years that I have been involved in Edtech it’s that 1) there is a very large well of enthusiasm or hype that gets regularly refilled with whatever the newest tool is and 2) no matter how good a tool is, or how enthusiastically teachers embrace it, this is not a guarantee that it will stick around. ‘Free’ tools are particular vulnerable. Here are six web tools that were ‘all the rage’ - at least from what I was seeing - before they just one day went away to the digital graveyard.

1 Wordle - the word cloud generator

Oh my god, Wordle. This was before it became a household name for the letter game now owned by the New York Times. The original Wordle allowed you to make beautiful word clouds. For a few years, I would see wordle workshops at every single conference. We all made wordle word clouds for our slides. Wordle was supposed to be fantastic for vocabulary, for reading skills, for brainstorming, for speaking… Until one day it was just gone. I’m sure there are other word cloud sites that are very nice, but I maintain they will never match the hype for this one.

2 Edmodo

Like Facebook, but for your own courses! Actually this sounds like it could be horrifying, but back in the early days of Facebook teachers wanted to make groups for their classes without having to force everyone to join Facebook. Edmodo offered a social space, the possibility of uploading your own content, creating your own courses, making your own quizzes… It was up there with the early learning management systems. And it was free, I think, at least in the beginning. It suffered from many problems including security breaches and playing a bit fast and loose with student data and in 2022 it just went away.

3 Jamboard

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced," This Star Wars quote is from Obi Wan Kenobi after the Death Star blows up a whole planet. I think it could equally apply to the world of techie English teachers after Jamboard was shuttered. Jamboard was a Google product, one of the earlier and probably better collaborative whiteboard apps. How many times did I hear teachers tell me ‘I’ll make a jamboard with my students’! Jamboard was another of those always-present-at-conferences apps, and I think most teachers’ anguish was because they had invested so much time into creating their own jamboards only to have it all go away. Jamboard officially died in December 2024 but I feel it had been gone for awhile by then.

4 Google Reader

Google broke my little blogger heart when it shut down its reader service in 2013. I had ALL the blogs I was following in Google Reader, and I didn’t pay attention that it was going to be gone until too late. The shutdown was part of an operation cruelly called ‘spring cleaning’ at Google. Many of us who were active in the early 2010s online sort of depended on Google Reader to keep abreast of everything. Yes, yes, I know there were and are alternatives but it still sucked to lose that.

5 Google Groups

Google groups was yet another Google product (are you seeing a trend here?) that was enthusiastically embraced by teachers and many schools too, back when having a learning management system was either too expensive or required a full-time tech person to install and administer it. I remember visiting schools where all the teachers had Google Groups for each of their classes, and loads and loads of material in there. Which made it rather painful when the service was slowly stripped back bit by bit and finally pretty much dead in 2024. There is still some semblance of a Google Groups thing that exists, but you can’t search or post to it I believe now so yeah, that’s that.

6 Flipgrid

Finally, not a Google product! I thought Flipgrid was so cool when it first came out. It allowed you to make little tiny video messages. I taught on at least three courses where we had students introduce themselves on a Flipgrid. This was back in 2015 or 2016. By 2018 Flipgrid was acquired by Microsoft so right there was a warning sign that we shouldn’t rely on it being around. It was renamed Flip in 2022 (by that time many of us had already left) and in 2024 was retired as it was going to be made an element of Teams, the Microsoft videoconference service.

I could keep going - my gosh I haven’t even mentioned Skype which is also dying a death this year. Then there are the products that were ‘free’ for a good amount of time, just long enough for teachers to get well and hooked, before they suddenly became subscription based and not really that cheap either (looking at you, Ning). I know, I know we are supposed to develop resilience and critical thinking about these tools but it still stings! I wonder, will I need to update this list with one of several AI companies or tools in the next few years?

Incidentally, there is a fun website of all the things that Google killed are listed, it’s called Killed by Google. And if I was annoyed by the death of Google Groups and Google Reader, that pales in comparison to how furious I was when they killed Stadia, their cloud gaming platform!