iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

Creative Writing

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. 

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

A Comic Creation Contest for Kids

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Last month comic templates were added to the popular Book Creator iPad app. Book Creator is hosting a contest to showcase those new templates. The contest is open to students under the age of 13. To enter students have to create a comic story by using the templates in the Book Creator iPad app. The winner will receive an iPad Pro and two runners-up will receive iPad minis.

The rules of the contest are quite complex so make sure you read them all before your students begin. One of the rules that jumps out is that you cannot have more than three entries from the same school. Therefore, you might need to host your own contest within your school to determine which comics will be entered into the Book Creator contest.

Watch the video embedded below to learn more about the comics creation option in Book Creator.

Create Comics on Your iPad With Halftone 2

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Screen Shot 2014-07-07 at 8.02.52 PM Halftone 2 is a nice iPad app for creating simple comic strips based on your pictures. To get started with Halftone 2 you choose a layout for your comic then import pictures from your iPad’s camera roll. You can add borders and visual effects to each of your imported pictures. After arranging your pictures you can add text in a variety of comic styles. Completed projects can be shared in a variety of ways including email, Dropbox, Twitter, and saving to camera roll. Watch the short video below to learn more about Halftone 2.

Halftone 2 could be a good iPad for students to use because it does not require students to create accounts in order to create comics.

 

5 Nice iPad Apps for Visual Storytelling

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One of my favorite ways to help students start a story is by having them use visuals around which they create a story. Here are five iPad apps that students can use to do that.

Tell About This is a fantastic iPad app (free and paid versions available) through which students can quickly create short digital stories. The concept behind the app is simple and well-executed. When students open Tell About This they can pick from an assortment of pictures that contain a story starter. Students listen and or read the story prompt and reply by tapping the record button to record a short story about the picture that they see. The stories that students record can be saved to their iPads or emailed to their teachers. In addition to using the existing story prompts, Tell About This allows teachers and students to create and share their own story prompts. To create a story prompt just take a picture or import a picture from your camera roll, add some text, and record the prompt.

Storehouse is a free iPad app for visual storytelling with your pictures and video clips. The basic idea behind Storehouse is to create stories by combining images, text, and video clips on a blank canvas. To create your stories you can import pictures and video from your iPad’s camera roll, from Instagram, from Dropbox, and fromFlickr. You can arrange the sequence of the media by dragging and dropping it into place. You can add text above and below each picture or video clip in your story. Completed Storehouse stories can be shared via email, Facebook, and Twitter. Stories published through Storehouse are given their own URLs for online viewing. You can see my sample story here. Stories can also be embedded into a blog post.

Strip Designer is a slick comic strip creation tools that allows students to create comics from scratch by drawing pictures, taking pictures, or importing pictures. Students can import pictures from a variety of places including Facebook, Dropbox, and the camera roll on their iPads. Each frame in your students’ comic strips is created individually and is not tied to an overall theme. This means that one frame in their comic strips could be based on a photo and the next frame could be based on a drawing. The borders and shading effects for each frame can be individually adjusted too. To help students really tell stories through comics, Strip Designer offers a slew of text editing tools, digital stickers, and drawing tools.

Toonia Storymaker is a cute iPad app that children can use to create short illustrated stories. To create stories on Toonia Storymaker children choose pre-drawn characters and settings for their stories. The characters can be dropped into multiple settings within the same story. The appearance of the characters in Toonia Storymaker can be edited. Once a character and setting is chosen children can type their stories in the speech bubbles. When the story is complete it can be emailed to parents and teachers or simply saved in the app. Toonia Storymaker does not require children to start every story from scratch. The app offers a couple of pre-made stories that children can read and edit. Any story that a child saves on the app can be revisited and edited at anytime. In that way you could have students craft a story, email it to you, and then you can give them suggested edits for their stories. Doing that could make using Toonia Storymaker a fun way for students to develop their creative writing skills.

Little Story Maker is a great little app that adults and children can use to create their own custom books on their iPads. The app provides book templates that you complete with your own images, text, and voice narration. All of the books that you create are stored in your Little Story Maker bookshelf. To create a book in Little Story Maker start by adding a title, add a cover image by selecting from your iPad’s camera roll, then choose a template for your book. On each page you can add an image from your camera roll and type the text for your page. If you want to add narration to your book simply click the “record audio” button after typing your text. Then you can add narration that will play on the page.