iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

social studies

Geography Duel – One iPad, Two Players

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Screen Shot 2014-12-01 at 8.04.20 AM From the same people who produced the popular Math Duel iPad app comes a similar app called Geography Duel. Geography Duel allows two students to compete head-to-head on one shared iPad. In two player mode Geography Duel features a split screen with maps facing each player. Students compete to identify U.S. states, U.S. state capitals, and countries. In the app’s settings menu you can change the base map from political map to a satellite view map.

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While the app is designed for two players to enjoy, Geography Duel can be used as a single player app too. Registration is not required in order to use the app.

Three iPad Apps for Creating Multimedia eBooks

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One of my favorite things about iPads and the web in general is the ease with which anyone can create a multimedia product. Teachers can create and organize multimedia reference materials for students and students can create multimedia products to show off their ideas. The following three iPad apps allow you and your students to create multimedia ebooks.

story_creatorStory Creator is a free iPad app that makes it easy to create narrated picture books on your iPad. To create a narrated picture book on Story Creator start by inserting a picture as your book’s cover. To create a page just tap the “+” icon and import a picture, draw a picture, type some text, or do all three. After completing one or all three of those previous actions tap the microphone icon to record your narration. After making your recording you can quickly adjust it so that each word of text is highlighted to match the timing of your narration.

storymakerLittle 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.

book_creatorBook Creator allows anyone to create their own books using images, text, videos, and audio recordings. You can arrange your book in three different formats; portrait, square, or landscape. Each page in your book can include pictures and videos from your iPad’s camera roll and or from your iTunes library. In addition to the pictures and videos you can include as much as text as you can fit on each page. In fact, if you just want to have text on a page you can do that. If you would like to narrate your book you can tap the record button to add your voice to each page of your book. Every page in your book can have a custom color scheme. Your completed Book Creator projects can be sent directly to your iBooks library or shared to a service like Box or Dropbox where they will be available as ePub publications.

Three Free(ish) iPad Apps for Creating Narrated Stories

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Creating narrated slideshows is one of the easiest ways to introduce students to digital storytelling practices. Students can create narrated slideshows to illustrate and explain their research findings, to tell a personal story, or to outline the framework for a story that will written down later. The following three iPad apps all provide an easy way to create narrated slideshows.

shadow puppetShadow Puppet Edu is my favorite app on this list. Shadow Puppet Edu is a free iPad app that students can use to create audio slideshow videos. The app offers an integrated search tool that students can use to find pictures from the Library of Congress, to search for images from NASA, and to find Creative Commons licensed images from Flickr. Students can also import pictures from the camera roll on their iPads. After selecting a set of images students can arrange them into any sequence by simply dragging and dropping them into order. Then to create a story students press the record button and talk while flipping through their images. Students can share their Shadow Puppet Edu projects through a variety of avenues including YouTube and email. Shadow Puppet Edu projects are automatically saved to the camera roll on a student’s iPad.

Screen Shot 2014-11-20 at 9.57.30 PM30hands is a free iPad app that makes it very easy to create a narrated slideshow. To create a basic narrated slideshow on 30hands all you need to do is import images from your iPad’s camera roll then press the record button below each image to record your narration. If you don’t have any pictures on your iPad you can take pictures using the 30hands app. 30hands also allows you to draw images instead of importing pictures. You can combine imported pictures with drawn images in your presentations. And you can draw on top of imported images. When your project is complete you can save it on your iPad or share it with the 30hands community.

30hands is also available in a pro version. The pro version of 30hands allows for integration of Google Drive and Dropbox for storing and sharing projects. Additionally, the pro version offers the option to insert video clips into your slides.

pixntellPixntell is an iPad app for quickly creating simple narrated photostories. To create a story using Pixntell all that you need to do is start a new project, select some images, place them in order, and then start talking about each of your pictures. You control the timing for each image. If you want to talk about your first picture for twenty seconds, your second picture for just three seconds, and your third picture for fifteen seconds, you can do that. Pixntell allows you to crop your pictures, add text them, add filters to them, place fun stickers on your pictures, and draw on your images highlight a portion of them. When your project is complete you can upload it directly to YouTube, save it in your Dropbox account, share it on Facebook, or send to friends via email. The free version of Pixntell allows you include five images in your projects. The paid version allows you use an unlimited amount of images in your projects.

News-O-Matic – Daily News for Kids in English and Spanish

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Screen Shot 2014-10-28 at 6.42.42 PM News-O-Matic is a service that offers daily news stories for elementary school students. Along with the news stories News-O-Matic provides videos, games, and quizzes to help students learn about the world. The latest update to the News-O-Matic iPad app introduced an option to quickly switch between an English and a Spanish version of the app.

News-O-Matic does a good job of offering students a number of options for learning about the topic of a chosen news article. When students choose articles from the News-O-Matic homescreen they are taken directly to that article where they can then read the article as is or choose to have it read aloud to them. A menu to the right of each article contains access to additional features like a summary of key facts, tools for highlighting sections of the article, and slideshows and videos related to the topic of the chosen article.

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News-O-Matic is a subscription service. The app is free to install and use for accessing some articles. A subscription is required in order to unlock all of the app’s features.

Congressional Moments for iPad – Learn to Identify Primary Sources

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Screen Shot 2014-10-27 at 9.50.00 AM Congressional Moments is a free iPad app that features key Congressional activities that still affect our lives today. The app includes videos about six important areas. Those areas are the National Parks Service, Civil Rights, Child Labor, the Marshall Plan, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The videos are a nice part of the app, but my favorite aspects of the app are the sections designed to help students learn to distinguish the difference between primary and secondary sources.

Three sections of the Congressional Moments iPad app are designed to teach students the differences between primary and secondary sources and their roles in research. The “explore primary sources” section shows students a resource and asks them to choose if that source is a primary source or not. Students receive instant feedback with explanations of the correct answers. In “hear from the experts” students can watch a series of videos featuring two scholars explaining how to identify and use primary sources in research. The primary sources gallery in Congressional Moments features photos, drawing, letters, and maps arranged according to the themes included in the videos at the beginning of the app.

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The “think about it” section of the Congressional Moments iPad app asks students to use the information they read and watched in the previous parts of the app. The “think about it” section contains questions that teachers can use as the basis for lessons on the Congressional activities featured throughout the app.