iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

biology

Audubon Owls – Discover the Owls In Your Neighborhood

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Audubon Owls is an iPhone app (it will work on iPads too but it’s not optimized for them) that is small, multimedia encyclopedia of North American owls. Through the app you can learn about nineteen types of owls. The app provides maps of the range of each owl. To help you identify owls that you might hear in your part of North America, the app offers audio recordings of each owl’s calls. And as you might expect there are multiple pictures of each owl.

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One of the things that I think we often overlook with iPads in education is that they are mobile devices and our students should use them as such instead of just using them in the classroom. If you live in a rural area, have your students try to identify owls in the area by the sound of their calls. Let your students take their iPads or iPhones outside in the evening to play the call of owls to remind themselves of what they’re listening for.

Essential Skeleton – An Excellent iPad App for Students

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Screen Shot 2013-04-07 at 7.50.45 PM Essential Skeleton is a free iPad app that students studying the human skeletal system should download. The app puts a 3D skeleton on your students’ iPads. Students can zoom-in, zoom-out, and rotate the skeleton 360 degrees. When students zoom-in and tap on a bone they will see its name in English and Latin, have the option to hear an audio pronunciation of the bone’s name, learn about the connected bones, and write their own notes about the highlighted bone.

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Essential Skeleton is free to download and use. The developers offer a number of related apps that you may want to try. iMuscle might make a good companion to Essential Skeleton.

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Students Become Disease Detectives in Solve the Outbreak

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Screen Shot 2013-03-21 at 7.53.13 PM Solve the Outbreak is a free iPad app produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The app is a game that contains three epidemics for students to research. In each investigation students have to read the background, read clues, analyze data, and answer questions. The questions put students in the role of a medical professional tasked with helping to curtail the spread of the epidemic. Points are awarded to students for correct answers.

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Solve the Outbreak is a game that is appropriate for middle school and high school biology students. Extend your students’ use of the app by asking them to investigate other epidemics and how they were eventually curtailed.

Thanks to Barbara Rademacher for recommending this app. 

EarthViewer for iPad Takes You Through the History of Earth

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Screen Shot 2013-02-15 at 10.10.41 AM EarthViewer is a free iPad app that takes you through 4.5 billion years on Earth. EarthViewer allows you to select eons and eras to view. Within each eon and era you can view tectonic plates, continental drift, and other geological events. You can view major biological events in EarthViewer too. Climate data for the last one hundred years is available in the app. EarthViewer users can manipulate the virtual globe to see how each continent has moved and been altered over time.

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EarthViewer could be an excellent resource to include in a science or geography lesson. The EarthViewer developers recommend using the app to have students investigate the relationship between temperature and carbon dioxide concentration. They also recommend investigating the correlation between oxygen concentration and animal diversity.

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Take a Virtual Tour Inside Bones With This iPad App

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Screen Shot 2013-01-24 at 4.06.17 PM Powers of Minus Ten: Bone is a neat iPad app for biology students. The app takes students through ten levels of viewing the inside of human bones. Students can zoom through and explore each of the microscopic levels. The imagery starts at the level of viewing bones from the outside and ends with viewing the atoms within the bones. A neat aspect of the app is that students can select “healthy bone” or “broken bone.” By selecting “broken bone” students can view a broken bone and see how it heals.

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Powers of Minus Ten: Bone is the free (for now) follow-up to the Powers of Minus Ten: Cells and Genetics. The same concept of zooming through levels of microscopic views is used in Powers of Minus Ten: Cells and Genetics. Watch a short overview of that app in the video below.