iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

College

Quizlet for iPad – Review Your Notes Online or Offline

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Screen Shot 2014-10-01 at 8.52.59 AM Quizlet is a popular free service for creating and sharing sets of flashcards. Quizlet’s free iPad app makes all of their flashcards available to students wherever they take their iPads.

Through the Quizlet iPad app students can access their own sets of flashcards or search for those created and shared by others. Through the app students can access their flashcards used even when they don’t have an internet connection. Quizlet flashcards can include audio elements in eighteen languages. Audio support is available for Quizlet flashcards. To access the audio option students simply tap the speaker icon to hear the contents of their flashcards read aloud.

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Quizlet’s iPad app offers four review modes. “Cards” mode is your standard flipping of flashcards from question side to answer side. “Study” mode is just the a question with its answer displayed next to it. “Match” mode is a Memory-style game in which students look for matching cards. “Learn” mode is a Jeopardy-style activity in which students are shown a term and they have to type in a question.

Vizzywig – A Robust Video Editor for Your iPad (free for a limited time)

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Screen Shot 2014-09-25 at 11.10.48 AMVizzywig is a robust video editing app for your iPad. The app does all of the things that you would expect a video editing tool to do and more. Like iMovie does Vizzywig allows you to import images, video clips, and sounds to produce your video. You can easily add title screens and final credits to your video by just filling out the forms provided in the app. What Vizzywig offers that you won’t find in iMovie is the option to remotely record from up to 16 other iOS devices connected on the same wi-fi network.

Remote recording through Vizzywig allows you to capture and combine video clips from up to sixteen remotely connected devices. That feature could be great for capturing video footage of a school play, graduation ceremony, or sporting event.

Vizzywig’s basic user interface is rather intuitive. Some of the advanced features could take a bit of trial and error to master, but the basics are easy to understand. I created a short video in a matter of a couple of minutes the first time that I used the app. Vizzywig doesn’t require you to create an account in order to use the app. You will need to create an account to export your finished video to YouTube, Dropbox, or Vimeo. You can also simply save your video to your iPad.

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Vizzywig is normally $29.99, but it is free today (September 25). Thanks to Apps Gone Free for that tip. 

MyMind – Take Notes While Viewing Websites on Your iPad

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Screen Shot 2014-09-24 at 12.36.47 PM MyMind is a good iPad app for creating and organizing text, audio, and visual notes. MyMind allows you to type notes or write them free-hand. To each note you can add pictures, audio files, and video files. Your audio files can be recorded within the app. All notes are organized into notebooks that your create and name.

None of the features mentioned above are terribly unique on their own as other apps do the same things. What makes MyMind different from many of those other notebook apps is that you can view websites while taking notes in the app. Tapping the “research” button on the right-hand side of any note will create a split screen in the app. The right-hand screen becomes a web browser. You can take notes about a website you’re viewing within MyMind. You can even record an audio note while using the web browser in MyMind. That could be a great feature for students to use when they’re conducting research. They can quickly dictate a note about how they might use information from a particular website in their research reports.

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MyMind is currently priced at $4.99.

An Excellent Free Graphing Calculator for Your iPad – Desmos

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Screen Shot 2014-09-02 at 4.33.12 PM Desmos is a free graphing calculator that originally launched a few years ago as a web app before becoming an iPad app (the web app still works too). Recently, the Desmos iOS app was updated with some good features for students. First, Desmos is now properly formatted to work in landscape and portrait mode on iPads and iPhones. Second, you can now take pictures with the app to insert them into your graphs. Third, and most important to me and first-time uses of the app, a guided tour of the app’s features are now built into the app.

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In many cases using Desmos is a good alternative to purchasing expensive TI-84 Plus (or whatever the latest model is) calculators. If your school has a 1:1 program with laptops or iPads you can use Desmos in any classroom.

Review of the Pi Dock-iT Air iPad Case and Keyboard

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Dock_iT_Air_04_1024x1024The Pi Dock-iT keyboard and iPad case is one that I’ve seen advertised in quite a few places this summer. I recently received one to evaluate. DockiT provided me with the keyboard and case in exchange for a blog post. That has not influenced my evaluation of it.

The Dock-iT Air iPad case and keyboard is an all-in-one package. Your iPad snaps into the holder and the keyboard closes on the face of your iPad when you close the case. When the case is open your iPad can be positioned in a “portrait” or “landscape” orientation. The support for your iPad (the support is constructed of what feels like aluminum) can be set at any of fifteen viewing angles as well as being laid flat on top of the keyboard. The large selection of viewing angles is great. I’m not crazy about how the case and iPad felt when lying flat in my hand. If you don’t need a keyboard, you might be better off with a standard iPad case.

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The keyboard on the Dock-iT Air iPad case is my favorite thing about the case and keyboard combo. The keys have a crisp feel to them that makes touch typing easy by the standards of small keyboards. I’ve tried other small keyboards for iPads that lacked the crisp feel that I like when I’m typing. This review is being written on the Dock-iT Air keyboard. While I wouldn’t use this set-up to work on my Master’s thesis, I could definitely comfortably type a blog post or two on it. Students under 13 or anyone with smaller hands than mine might find the keyboard to be perfectly comfortable to use for hours of typing.

Pairing the Dock-iT Air keyboard to my iPad was a snap. I just turned on the keyboard, hit the connect key, then turned on my iPad’s Bluetooth setting where I entered the four digit pairing code provided by DockiT.

Overall, if you’re in the market for an iPad case and keyboard combo, I don’t think you can go wrong with the Dock-iT Air. Even though I didn’t give it a drop test, the case seems more than rugged enough for elementary school students who are prone to occasionally dropping their iPads. High school and college students who want a slick little package for writing notes without having to lug around their laptops will like the option to quickly type on their iPads.

At $79.00 the Dock-iT Aird is in the middle of the price range for keyboard and case combinations. Parle Innovation, the company that manufacturers the Dock-iT, is currently offering a free customizations of the case. Customization allows you to create a skin that displays your school’s logo or other graphic of your choice.