iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

digital storytelling

Shadow Puppet – A Nice iPad App for Telling Stories

by

Screen Shot 2013-10-07 at 8.00.41 AM Shadow Puppet is a nice new iPad app for creating short audio slideshows. It is quite easy to use the app to create and share your stories. To get started just select a set of pictures from your iPad’s camera roll or take a collection of new pictures with your iPad’s camera. Next arrange your pictures into sequence. After putting your pictures into order you simply tap the record button and talk about each picture for as long as you like. While you are talking you can zoom-in and or re-center your pictures to call attention to an important aspect of your pictures.

Evernote Camera Roll 20131007 080848

To share your Shadow Puppet creations you do have to have an email account (the Gmail+1 trick is a good work around for this if you have kids under 13). Your Shadow Puppet creations can be emailed to others and or shared on Twitter and Facebook. To get the embed code for a Shadow Puppet presentation you have to open the email and view the presentation online.

Drawp – Kids Can Safely Send Digital Greetings to Family Members

by

Screen Shot 2013-09-16 at 12.06.05 PM Drawp is a nice iPad app that I recently learned about from Jo Villis. Drawp allows children to create drawings, take pictures, and create audio recordings to send to parents, grandparents, and other family members in a safe environment. To use the app parents have to register themselves and their children. Parents approve the list of people that their children can send messages to. After creating their digital greeting cards students share their work by tapping the share button and tapping the pictures of the people that they want to send their messages to.

Drawp could be a good app to have elementary school students use to send a weekly update to their parents about what they have done in your classroom.

Evernote Camera Roll 20130916 120233

 

Evernote Camera Roll 20130916 120241

Drawp is a freemium app. The basic uses of the app are free. You can purchase extra themes through in-app purchases that range in price from $0.99 to $4.99.

Maily is a similar app that you might want to try as well.

27 Good iPad Apps for Elementary School Students

by

schoolbus-81717_640 As the new school year starts many teachers and their students will have iPads at their disposal for the first time. If you’re one of those teachers getting iPads in your classroom for the first time, you’re probably on the hunt for apps for your students. The short document embedded below provides a sample of some of the apps that you might want your students to use.

The document is hosted on Box.com. You should be able to download it from here. If you cannot see the document, click here for a direct link to it.

Tellagami – Create Narrated Animations on Your iPad

by

tellagamiTellagami is a free iPad that elementary school students will enjoy using to create narrated animations. If you have ever used Voki or GoAnimate, Tellagami will feel familiar to you. Tellagami allows your students to create customized animated scenes in a matter of minutes. To create a narrated, animated scene students simply open Tellagami and tap “create.” After opening the create menu students will see a default character and background scene. The characters can be altered by selecting from a big menu of customization options. The background scenes can be changed by selecting from a menu or by inserting a picture from the iPad’s camera roll. To add their voices to their animations students simply tap “record” and start talking. Completed animations are stored on the camera rolls of your students’ iPads. Tellagami does not require students to create accounts or have an email address.

Evernote Camera Roll 20130730 082159

Consider having your students use Tellagami to create narrated animations of their favorite scenes from books that they’ve read. Or have them use Tellagami to animate parts of stories that they have created from scratch.

Evernote Camera Roll 20130730 082207

Fotobabble – Turn Pictures Into Stories

by

Screen Shot 2013-06-09 at 11.28.54 AM Fotobabble is a fun service that I’ve featured in the past on Free Technology for Teachers. The web version of Fotobabble makes it easy to turn pictures into short, narrated stories. The iOS app for Fotobabble does the same. Using Fotoabble is easy, just select an image from your camera roll and start recording your voice. You can comment on your photo, explain what’s happening your photo, or tell a story related to your photo.

The Fotobable iOS app could be a great app for students to use to quickly create short audio stories about pictures that they take with their iPhones and or iPads (the app isn’t optimized for iPad, but it works on it). The app could be used by students to do some “on the spot” reporting during a field trip. Over time your class could build a collection of audio captioned news images by embedding each of their Fotobabble creations on a class blog or wiki.