iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

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Lead Group Browsing Sessions With RabbleBrowser for iPad

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Screen Shot 2013-10-28 at 4.27.34 PM RabbleBrowser is an iPad app that teachers can use to lead their students in a shared web browsing experience. With RabbleBrowser installed teachers can broadcast their browsers to their students’ iPads. Likewise, students can lead the browsing session and the teacher can follow along. Through RabbleBrowser teachers can lock students iPads into the same browser screen. The video below offers an overview of the RabbleBrowser experience.

RabbleBrowser could be a good app to use when you want to distribute links to students and have them all read the same article for a classroom discussion. RabbleBrowser could also be useful for opening and sharing media across all of the iPads in your classroom.

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RabbleBrowser is currently priced at $2.99 (less with volume purchasing).

goREACT – Create Virtual Chemical Reactions on Your iPad

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Screen Shot 2013-10-07 at 12.38.13 PM goREACT is a new iPad app from the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago. This free iPad app allows students to virtually create chemical reactions. To create the reactions students simply drag elements from the periodic table to the “reaction area.” The app includes suggested reactions to help students get started. In all there are nearly 300 chemical reactions supported on the app. The app includes pictures and videos related to the reactions that students can virtually create on goREACT.

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goREACT could be a great app to use in a science classroom in which you cannot access (for good reasons in some cases) some of the materials needed to make chemical reactions.

Thoughtree – Quickly Record Your Thoughts On Your iPad

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Screen Shot 2013-09-26 at 1.02.30 PM Thoughtree is a free iPad app for quickly recording and sharing your thoughts. The app is quite easy to use. To record your thought just tap the “+” icon at the bottom of the screen and type your note to yourself. Thoughtree does offer the option to create folders to organize your thoughts. Thoughtree notes can also be labeled with reminder icons. All of your notes can be shared via email or your favorite social network.

Thoughtree isn’t the most robust app that you’ll try this week, but it if you’re looking for a simple app in which to write your notes, Thoughtree is definitely worth giving a try.

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A Handful of Free iPad Apps for Creating Videos

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Even if they haven’t used it, most iPad owners are familiar with iMovie. Many schools buy it for all of the iPads that they distribute to students and teachers. If your school hasn’t bought it for you or you just want to try some other video creation options without spending any money, take a look at this small collection of free video creation apps for your iPad.

loopsterLoopster is a free iPad app that is probably the closest you will come to iMovie without spending any money. Loopster is the app that I would have my students use for documentary style videos and other projects that are going to go more than 60-90 seconds in length. The Loopster iPad app provides a four track editor. There are tracks for video and images, transitions, sounds, and text. You can import images and videos from your iPad’s camera roll or shoot a new video with the app and edit it. On the video editing track you can trim clips and combine clips. On the text track you can add speech bubbles and other text effects. Loopster has a slow motion effect that is available on the iPad app too. When your Loopster project is completed you can share it to YouTube, Facebook, or email it. Your completed Loopster projects can also be saved to the camera roll on your iPad. (Update: As of November 2013 Loopster is no longer free)

Screen-Shot-2013-06-03-at-10.01.40-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.

Screen-Shot-2012-12-20-at-7.18.40-PMThe Knowmia Teach iPad app is an excellent app for creating your own whiteboard videos. Some of the highlights of Knowmia Teach app include the option to use your iPad’s camera to record yourself while drawing on the whiteboard. You will appear in the corner of the screen so that your students can see you while you’re talking them through the lesson. The app includes the option to import images and graphics from your iPad to your lessons. You can draw free-hand on the whiteboard screen, type on the whiteboard screen, and insert pre-made shapes and figures. All Knowia Teach lessons can be uploaded to the Knowmia website with just one tap of your iPad’s screen. Students can watch your lessons on the Knowmia website.

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.

Screen Shot 2013-08-27 at 3.37.08 PMVideo Star is a fun and free music video creation app. To create a music video on Video Star just select a song that you have stored on your iPad then start shooting live video. The music will play for as long as you record or until the end of the song. You can also import images from your iPad to create your video. Video Star also lets you apply special effects to your video. Some of the effects that you can apply include text boxes, title boxes, frames around images, transitions, and split screens. Your completed Video Star video can be exported to YouTube or sent to anyone via email.

5 Free iPad Apps Students Can Use for Taking Notes

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school-36784_150 One of the things that I love about the start of the new school year is that so many students have goals for making “this year the year they…” For many students that blank is filled in with “stay organized” or “take better notes.” If your students are going to be using iPads in your classroom this year, here are five free iPad apps they can try for taking notes and keeping those notes organized.

inClass is a fantastic free iPad app that students can use to take and keep track of the notes they record in all of their courses. inClass allows students to organize notebooks for each of their courses. Within each notebook students can include typed notes, audio notes, video notes, and pictures. The ability to store those four types of notes makes inClass a great app for students to use in a science lab where they might want to have a little video clip of an experiment along with their own typed notes about the lab experiment.

Evernote is the Swiss Army knife of iPad apps. Students can use Evernote for a little bit of everything from bookmarking websites to dictating notes to themselves. The app will automatically sync with students online Evernote accounts so that they can access my notes, bookmarks, and saved files from any computer or device that is connected to the web.

Penultimate provides a place for you to hand-write notes on your iPad. The app allows you to create multiple notebooks with multiple pages in each. You can change the color and size of the pen strokes that are created when you write in your notebooks. Each page in your notebook can include pictures that you have stored on your iPad or pictures that you take through the Penultimate app. The app provides the option to change the look of the virtual paper on which you write. You can copy and paste content from one page to another and from one notebook to another.

Fetchnotes is a service for creating and organizing notes for yourself. Organizing your notes on Fetchnotes is quite simple. When you write a note, just use a hashtag to label your note. Then whenever you want to search for a note just enter a hashtag. For example, if I was a student taking notes in a history course I might use the hashtag “#revolution” for all notes related to revolutions. Then I could go back and read all of my notes about revolution by just searching for that hashtag. Fetchnotes lets you create groups of people with whom you share notes. When you want to share a note with someone else in your group just add @ before that person’s name to have the task appear on your list and his or her list. In addition to being available through the free iPad app, Fetchnotes can be used in your web browser. Fetchnotes also offers a free Android app.

Last but not least is Google Drive for iPad. While not nearly as robust as the browser-based version of Google Drive, Google Drive for iPad can be used by students to create notes documents. If your school is using Google Apps for Education, your students are probably already familiar with how to use Google Drive. Of course, their notes will sync to their Google Drive accounts so that they can access their notes through any Internet-connected device. Click here for a short (13 page PDF) guide to using Google Drive for iPad.