iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

How to Make a Screencast of Your iPad’s Screen

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ipad-606766_640One of the best ways to help people learn how to use an app or complete a workflow process on an iPad is to show them. Every year schools have workshops dedicated to showing teachers how to use their iPads. The trouble comes after the workshop is over and teachers have forgotten a key step or two. The solution to this problem is to create screencast videos that teachers can refer to throughout the school year.  There are a couple of ways that you can create a screencast video of your iPad’s screen.


Method 1 – If you have a Mac computer:

Connect your iPad to your Mac by using the Lightning cable (the cable that came with your iPad). Then open QuickTime on your Mac. Next select “new movie recording” from the QuickTime menu. You can then choose the name of your iPad and click record. When you’re done recording your new screencast will save to your computer as a video file that you can then edit in iMovie if you want to cut out portions of it or lay a music track under your narration.


Method 2 – If you have a Windows computer:

You will need a third-party service that allows you to mirror your iPad to the screen of your Windows computer. Air Server is the service that I recommend for mirroring an iPad to a Windows computer. Air Server includes a recording tool that  you can use to make a screencast video of your iPad’s screen. With Air Server running you can just tap record and instantly start capturing your screen and your narration. The video will save on your Windows computer where you can then edit it and or upload it to your favorite video hosting service.

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.

Inspire Creative Writing With the Scribeasy App

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scribeasy icon One of the challenges of teaching creative writing can be just getting students to start a story. That’s when apps like Scribeasy can be quite helpful as they provide students with visual prompts that can inspire the start of a story.

Scribeasy is a free iPad app that offers a fun environment in which students can write short stories. Students create stories on Scribeasy by first selecting a background image then dragging and dropping additional pictures onto their chosen background images. When students select objects to add to their backgrounds, a narrator reads the name of the object aloud. Students can move and resize all images to create a visual story in Scribeasy.

scribeasy writing

Once the visuals are in place on Scribeasy students then write a story about the scenes they’ve created. The next step is where Scribeasy shines. Scribeasy gives students a list of suggested words to use in their stories. The writing process is a timed activity. Students can choose to write for a short, medium, or large amount of time (they can extend the time if needed). Completed stories are saved in the app. Students can also save their stories to the camera roll on their iPads.

Part of this post originally appeared on my other blog, FreeTech4Teachers.com