The best tools to create a digital advent calendar in class (2025)

Last updated on 12 May 2026

How do you create an Advent Calendar for your students? Looking to boost your class during the month of December? A digital advent calendar provides a good opportunity to create a daily educational ritual that your students will love.

I propose an updated version for 2025 of this selection of tools, enriched with the latest developments in the strongest services and some new ways to go further.

The fundamentals of the digital advent calendar

Modern origin and tradition
The tradition of the advent calendar, which originated in Germany, has been considerably modernised. From a simple paper medium with pious images, it has become an interactive educational tool that makes it possible to:

• Maintaining student motivation
• Revise the notions of the quarter
• Developing digital skills
• Creating a positive class dynamic

You will find many examples online that allow you to create and then download or view a free virtual advent calendar online.

It’s up to you to imagine yours and prepare the virtual surprises to slip behind the boxes to surprise your students. Images, videos, riddles, charades, surprises … Here is a selection of tools that will allow you to make advent calendars online with tips to make your calendar even more original.

Structure and operation
An advent calendar traditionally has 24 boxes, one for each day from 1 to 24 December. In digital form, each box may contain:

• Educational activities
• Daily challenges
• Multimedia content
• Quizzes and educational games
• Thematic surprises

💡 To remember : Give preference to tools accessible from a simple link, compatible computers/tablets/smartphones, and avoid as much as possible the need to create an account for students (GDPR, simplicity).

Let's move on to the list of tools to create your Christmas calendar.

AdventMyFriend. A classic of online Christmas calendars

 

AdventMyFriend is the choice of simplicity. This is a great classic of online advent calendar generators. I have already had the opportunity to present this Christmas Calendar Generator Right Here. The service offers after registration simple tool to create your own calendar. Direct access to an image bank will allow you to find illustrations if necessary. Each box can contain text, sounds, images or videos.

Pedagogical strengths:

• Interface in French
• Easy integration of multimedia content
• Possibility to schedule the opening of boxes
• Integrated image bank

Suggestions for use:

• Cycle 2: Sound hiding places with rhymes
• Cycle 3: Daily Mathematical Enigmas
• College: short revisions by subject

MyAdvent. A generator of complete and quality Advent calendars

MyAdvent is all in English but getting started is surprisingly easy. The tool allows you to upload photos, voice messages and videos to create your free staff calendars.

For each day of December, you can upload a photo, voice message or video from YouTube. You can even combine them for each day. If you have a website or blog, you can integrate your calendar with HTML code provided directly by the service. MyAdvent makes it possible to create an advent calendar to be downloaded free of charge and without advertising for personal use.

Although in English, this tool stands out as:

• Simultaneous import of photos, sounds and videos
• The ENT Integration Code
• Lack of advertising in free version
• Easy sharing with families

Note: MyAdvent now offers "Pro" options (paid) to go further (password, music, MP3, uploaded video, etc.). For classic use in class, the free version remains largely sufficient.

💡 Idea: Ask each student to prepare the contents of a box (image + short audio or written message). You get a calendar collaborative which belongs to the class.

Genially. The all-in-one creative option (ready-to-use models)

Genially is another ideal solution for creating interactive and beautiful advent calendars. The platform offers Ready-to-use templates for teachers. You can easily add multimedia content like videos, sounds, animations, quizzes and games.

The intuitive interface makes it possible to quickly create a personalised calendar that students can view on all their devices. One of Genially’s strengths is its collaborative dimension, allowing several teachers to work together on the same project or to involve students in creating the calendar.

Examples of activities:

• Advent calendar for general culture (history, geography, science, EMI …)
• Timetable of the digital tools for students (discovery of 24 services)
• Timetable of the literary or artistic works of a topic studied

Tuerchen. An interactive calendar that looks great

Tuerchen is originally a professional digital advent calendar solution, widely used by businesses, but which may also be of interest to some schools.

Interesting news for 2025:

• New editor more ergonomic
• Creation of calendars assisted by AI : the tool can offer content or structures that you then adapt
• New graphic models
• Advanced customization possibilities (games, forms, … mini-contests)

For the class, Tuerchen is to be booked:

• To plans for establishment or School/college communication (Calendar shared with families, for example)
• Uses where a very professional rendering is desired (school website, school portal)

Keep in mind: the free version remains limited and displays advertising.

eCalendar. Another free solution to create Christmas calendars

eCalendar is a good resource to create or have created a multimedia advent calendar. You will be able to hide behind each small window a video, a text or a photo. They will open day after day in December. The site generates a Unique URL for your calendar, convenient to share in an ENT or by email to families. The interface is less ‘modern’ than that of major international services, but it remains clear and suitable for school use.

Google Santa Tracker 2025. On the trail of Santa Claus

The Californian giant is faithful to this end-of-year rendezvous with a Santa Claus village filled with surprises and digital finds. Videos, games, news, Google offers every day from December until daylight a new animation under a real-time counter that shows the time remaining before 24 December.

The 2025 edition proposes:

• From new coding activities
• Up-to-date educational games
• Enriched educational resources
• Cultural content on holidays around the world
• An improved real-time counter

24 stories for Waiting for Christmas with Apple of Api

Like every year, with its 24 stories, Pomme d’Api by Bayard Presse accompanies the youngest beautifully until Christmas. From 1 December, Coco Moustache, the head of Santa’s toy workshop, takes you to Perpète-le-Bois-Joli to unravel a strange mystery.

Other tools to make your own calendar

To complete the initial selection, here are some tools and formats that can enrich your digital advent calendar.

BookWidgets or LearningApps to create "interactive boxes"

Instead of concentrating everything in a single generator, you can create the activities in other tools and then integrate the links into your main calendar (Genially, AdventMyFriend, MyAdvent, etc.):

• LearningApps : very varied interactive exercises (memory, classification, texts with holes, etc.) that you can link to each box
• BookWidgets : for those who have access to it, allows to generate self-correcting exercises and track the results

Each box in your calendar can thus point to a different interactive activity, while keeping a pleasant overview for students.

An advent calendar made with the Canva Graphic Toolkit

Canva offers you in its thousands of models to customize several Christmas calendars. It's up to you to customize them and then print them.

You can:

• Create a calendar to print
• Incorporating QR codes which refer to digital content (video, Genially, online activity)
• Entrust graphic personalization to students (work on composition, typography, … message)

This type of hybrid calendar allows you to keep a strong visual presence in the classroom while taking advantage of the wealth of digital technology.

A homemade paper advent calendar is also good

You can also opt for non-digital alternatives to vary the pleasures. The digital advent calendar is an easy option to celebrate the end-of-year holidays in the classroom, but the magical effect of a pretty traditional advent calendar made of paper, cardboard or even rolls of toilet paper should not be underestimated.

Imagine, for example, a large mural where each cover not only hides a surprise, but also becomes part of a collective work that gradually unfolds. The 24 boxes can form, once opened, an illuminated world map or a colorful chronological frieze.

Recovery materials make sense here: turn matchboxes into mini-theaters where student-prepared ditnets are played, recycle rolls of toilet paper into long-views to observe hidden images, or use decorated kraft envelopes that later become decorative elements. These physical media can also be perfectly combined with digital content via QR codes inserted into each sleeve.

If you are looking for ideas for cardboard Advent calendars, you can take a look at Pinterest where you will find hundreds of calendars made of kraft paper or on the medium of your choice.

On track for the end of the year

The educational interest of the advent calendar lies in its ability to maintain student engagement while structuring learning in a fun and fun way. Whether digital, physical or hybrid, it creates good dynamics in the classroom at a time when students’ attention to the annoying tendency to weaken somewhat.

💡 Keep in mind that surprise and progression are the keys to a successful advent calendar.

And why not mix approaches: a digital day, a manual day, an individual day, a collective day … The preparation of this calendar can itself become an interesting pedagogical project, involving students in its design and implementation.

So much for these few tracks and tools. Please feel free to help me complete the list with comments. If you are making real calendars, don’t forget to take a picture of them and send them to me 😉