The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers
iBrainstorm is a free brainstorming application for the iPad and the iPhone. The app allows you to record brainstorming sessions using a combination of free hand drawings and sticky notes. You can share and collaborate with other users of iBrainstorm. Sharing notes and drawings between users in a local setting is a simple matter of “flicking” an item to another user.
Watch the video below to see iBrainstorm in action.
Subtext is a great free iPad app that provides a place for teachers and students to have digital book discussions.
These are some of the many things that you can do with Subtext: using Subtext you can read ebooks, annotate ebooks, create quizzes about ebooks, and write blog posts about the ebooks you read. You can create private and public book discussion groups and build bookshelves for your groups.
To add books to your Subtext bookshelves you can pull from Google Books (many free ebooks are available that way), buy ebooks from Subtext (volume pricing is available), or upload your own titles (Greg Kulowiec has posted directions here). To annotate a section of a book just highlight it then choose what you want to do with it. The text that you highlight can be annotated with your messages, you can assign a quiz question to that text, or label that section as a literary element like “personification” or “foreshadowing.”
Haiku Deck is an iPad app that all students and teachers should have installed on their iPads. Haiku Deck enables anyone to create beautiful slide presentations. It’s so easy to use that when I was describing the app to someone last week I said it was like “Animoto for slide decks.” Like other slide presentation apps Haiku provides templates for creating your presentation. But there are some significant differences between Haiku Deck and other presentation apps.
There are two features of Haiku Deck that stand out. First, Haiku Deck intentionally limits how much text that you can put on each of your slides. Second, Haiku Deck helps you find Creative Commons licensed images for your presentations. When you type a word or words on your slides you can have Haiku Deck search for images for you. The images that Haiku Deck serves up are large enough to completely fill your slide. You can also upload your own images from your iPad or import images from Instagram and Facebook.
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| A slide from one of my Haiku Decks. |
Haiku Deck has an adequate selection of free templates that should suit all students. However, Haiku Deck also has additional templates available for purchase.
If you’re looking for a new video editing app, Pinnacle Studio is one iPad app that deserves your attention.
Pinnacle Studio for iPad reminds me quite a bit of iMovie. In testing Pinnacle Studio I found it to have a more intuitive interface than iMovie (and I’ve used iMovie on my MacBook for years). Within the first thirty seconds of using the app I was applying zoom effects, trimming and combining video clips, and adding a sound track to my project. The Pinnacle Studio editor works in landscape and portrait mode although I found it easier to use in landscape mode. Your finished Pinnacle Studio project can be exported to YouTube, uploaded to a Box.net account, emailed, saved on your iPad, or sent to your PC if you have Pinnacle Studio for PC.
