iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

language arts

Maily for iPad Gives Students a Safe Place to Learn to Email

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maily Maily is a free iPad app that provides young children with a safe and fun way to send emails to parents and selected family members. To use Maily parents have to create accounts for their children. Parents select and add contacts for their children. After the account is created children can then send and receive emails only from the people that their parents have added to their children’s contacts list.

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The user interface that children see in Maily is very kid-friendly. Using Maily children can draw pictures, use templates to create emails, and or upload pictures to send. To send an email children click the send button and the select the image of the person to they want to receive their messages.

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Maily could be great for introducing young children to email in a safe environment. You could have your students use the Maily app to have students send weekly emails to their parents about what they did in your classroom each week.

Use Little Story Maker to Create Custom Books on Your ipad

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Screen Shot 2012-12-21 at 9.04.38 AM Little Story Maker is a great little app that adults and children can use to create their own custom books on their iPads. The app provides book templates that you complete with your own images, text, and voice narration. All of the books that you create are stored in your Little Story Maker bookshelf.

To create a book in Little Story Maker start by adding a title, add a cover image by selecting from your iPad’s camera roll, then choose a template for your book. On each page you can add an image from your camera roll and type the text for your page. If you want to add narration to your book simply click the “record audio” button after typing your text. Then you can add narration that will play on the page.

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After you create your book it is saved in your Little Story Maker bookshelf. When you read the book you will have three options to choose from. You can read it on your own, have it read to you, or you can tap “auto play” to have the book read and pages turned for you.

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Little Story Maker is a free app that could be used by elementary school students to create short stories about real events that they’ve observed and photographed with their iPads. For example, you could take your students on a walking tour of the neighborhood and have them write a story about it when they return to your classroom.

Put Shakespeare on Your iPad

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Screen Shot 2012-12-19 at 5.16.21 PM Whether we loved it or we hated it, reading Shakespeare was something that most of us had to do in school. Today’s students read Shakespeare’s works too.  When we read Shakespeare we had to carry a physical book around. Today’s students can read Shakespeare’s works on their iPads through Shakespeare by Readdle which puts Shakespeare’s famous and lesser-known works on their iPads.

Shakespeare by Readdle includes all of Shakespeare’s published works. The app includes a search function to find specific phrases written by Shakespeare. Users can customize the app to adjust the color scheme, font style, and font size. The app also includes a scene breakdown or summary for each of the plays on the app.

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The pro version of Shakespeare by Readdle ($9.99 USD) includes an integrated glossary, a random Shakespeare quote generator, a Shakespeare facts database, and Shakespeare portraits. But if just getting Shakespeare’s works onto your students’ iPads is what you want, the free version of the app is more than adequate.

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Vocabulary & Spelling City for iPad

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Screen Shot 2012-12-15 at 10.00.03 AM Vocabulary and Spelling City has been available on the web for years. It’s a great place for students to go to learn and practice spelling new vocabulary words. This year they launched an iPad and iPhone app. The free app grants students access to the same vocabulary lists that they use on the SpellingCity website. SpellingCity’s list of words for students currently exceeds 42,000.

The Spelling and Vocabulary City app offers eight free practice activities. I am particularly fond of the Missing Letter and Audio Word Match activities. In Missing Letter students have to identify the letter that is missing in order to correctly spell the words that they see. Audio Word Match is a memory game in which students flip over cards, hear the words on the cards read aloud, then try to match the cards.

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Students and teachers who register for accounts on Spelling City can create custom word lists (Note, new lists have to be made online. Through the app you can only access existing lists). If you don’t register you can simply choose from the many suggested word lists created by Spelling City. Teachers who register for premium accounts have access to reports on how their students are doing with the word lists they’ve created for their students.

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The Spelling and Vocabulary City app is free to download and is appropriate for elementary and middle school students. And in the interest of full disclosure I must tell you that Spelling City advertises on my other blog Free Technology for Teachers.

Create Picture Stories With PicView

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PicView is a free iPad app that makes it easy to create simple photo stories. PicView allows you to create an audio recording about a picture. You can add narration to pictures that you take with your iPad or pictures that you already have in your iPad’s camera roll. Your images can be enhanced with some simple color filters, border designs, a title, and markers. Your completed PicView story can be shared via email, posted on the PicView site, shared on Facebook, or shared on Twitter.