iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

Middle School

Book Creator Now Lets You Publish With One Tap

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Book Creator is a fantastic and popular iPad app for creating multimedia ebooks. In fact, more than 1,000,000 stories are created with the app every month. For years the only way to share the stories that students create was to turn their books into videos, publish them as PDFs, or publish them as ePub documents. All were fine options, but they required some extra steps in order for parents to see the books that their children made in your classroom. Last Friday that changed when Book Creator introduced a new option to publish Book Creator books online.

Book Creator books can now be published for easy online viewing. Publishing online essentially creates a webpage that you can share with your students’ parents so that they can view their students’ work on their tablets, phones, or laptops. It is important to note that students can’t publish their books independently. You, the teacher, have to publish the books on your students’ behalf from your Book Creator teacher account. Dan Kemp, the founder of Book Creator, is taking student privacy seriously and has published a statement about how Book Creator tries to protect students’ privacy.

Eventually, there will be a cost associated with publishing Book Creator books online. For now, you can publish ten books for free. Directions for publishing online can be found here.

Winning Words Offers Fun Word Games for Kids

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Winning Words is the developer of seven free word games for students to play on their iPads. All of the games use the same style as the classic Memory card game. For example, in Antonym Match students have to flip over one card that has a word written on one side. Then they have to flip over another card to try to find the antonym to the first word they saw. If a match isn’t found the cards flip over and the player has to start again.

Antonym Match can be played by up to four people at a time. You can choose a level of difficulty and the number of cards displayed in each game.

There are six similar games offered by Winning Words. Those games are Synonym Match, Homophone Match, Compound Word Match, Singular and Plural Match, Verb Match, and Double Letter Match. All of the Winning Words games can be found here.

The Winnings Words games are free and do not require registration in order to play.

Two Educational iPad Apps With Halloween Themes

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ipoeMath vs. Zombies is an iPad game with a spooky theme. The game is has three virtual worlds each containing ten levels of basic math problems. The object of the game is to correctly solve as many math problems as possible before the zombies catch you. The math of the game is basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. If you’re comfortable having your students play math games that have a zombie theme Math vs. Zombies offers engaging practice activities. Tap to Learn, the producers of Math vs. Zombies, offers a few non-zombie math games if you’re looking for something else to try on your iPad.

iPoe is an iPad app that features a collection of four of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. The stories include the animations and sounds. You can interact with some of the featured animations. The four stories included in iPoe are The Oval Portrait, The Tell-Tale Heart, Annabel Lee, and The Masque of the Red Death. 

Book Creator for iPad is 50% Off This Week

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book_creatorThe popular Book Creator iPad app turns five years old this week. To celebrate its birthday the developers are discounting the app by 50% all week (September 19 – September 25, 2016). The discount even applies to those using the volume purchasing program.

Book Creator allows anyone to create their own books using images, text, videos, drawings, 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.

For those who want to make multimedia comics, Book Creator is a great choice. Comic templates including comic fonts, speech bubbles, and characters can be used in Book Creator books.

Book Creator allows you to export your books to ePub format. The exported file can be opened and read in the Chrome web browser using the free Readium browser extension. This is a great option as it allows a parent who doesn’t have an iPad at home to view his or her child’s work at home.

I’m sure this post reads like an advertisement for Book Creator. I don’t have any business affiliation with the Book Creator developers. I shared the news just because I think it’s a great app and it’s available at a great price right now. 

SeeSaw Introduces SeeSaw Plus – Improved Skills Assessment Features

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seesaw app icon SeeSaw, a popular digital portfolio service, has introduced a new offering called SeeSaw Plus. SeeSaw Plus gives teachers a bunch of useful new features. The best of those features is a tool for creating a list of standards and skills that students should demonstrate through the work they submit to their SeeSaw portfolios. Teachers can tag submitted work with a standard or skill rating. Teachers can then view a summary of ratings within SeeSaw in a section called Skills View. Watch the video below to learn more about the Skills View.

Some of the other key features of SeeSaw Plus include creating private notes on your students’ work. Those notes don’t appear in the students’ or parents’ view of the assignment. Teachers who are sharing SeeSaw classrooms can share private notes with each other.

SeeSaw Plus is included in SeeSaw for Schools subscriptions. You can also purchase SeeSaw Plus as a stand-alone product. The core SeeSaw product that has always been free is still free and unchanged.