iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

educational games

Create Educational Games With Tap n’ Type from TinyTap

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tinytap_new_logoTinyTap is a popular tool for creating your own educational games. TinyTap lets you create educational games on your iPad. Games that you create can be played by your students on their iPads, Android tablets, or in the web browser on their laptops. Earlier this month TinyTap introduced a new game format that you can use. That format is calledTap n’ Type.

TinyTap’s Tap n’ Type format allows you to create games in which students type letters and or numbers to complete a puzzle. See Tap n’ Type in action in the video below or click here to try a game.

TinyTap Introduces Insights to Track Your Students’ Progress on the Games You Make

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tinytap TinyTap is a great iPad app for developing your own educational games. I’ve been a big supporter of the app since it launched a couple of years ago. This week TinyTap introduced a new feature called Insights through which you can track your students’ use of your games. TinyTap Insights enables you create student groups, distribute activities to your students, and review your students’ progress on the activities that you assign to them. TinyTap Insights is a paid service, but you can get it for free this summer by referring others to the service.

More About TinyTap:
Through the app (also available for Android) you can build games by uploading pictures or taking new pictures that you arrange into sets. Then select each image to create questions about it. To create your question press the record button and start talking. When you have finished talking select a portion of your picture to serve as the answer. I created a small game about objects in my house. I took four pictures of things in my house. Each question asked players to identify the objects in my house. For example, when a player sees a picture of my kitchen he or she has to identify the tea pot by touching it.

TinyTap has options for creating Sound Boards and Shape Puzzles to go along with simple identification activities. A Sound Board is an image or set of images to which you add your voice. To create a Sound Board you highlight elements of a picture then record yourself talking about those elements. When a student views your Sound Board he or she can tap on highlighted portions of the image to hear you talking about them. This could be a great option for creating a narration of a flowchart or a diagram.

Shape Puzzles on Tiny Tap are games in which students have to drag pieces of an image into place in order to make the image whole. A great example of this is found in a Shape Puzzle about third grade sight words. Students hear the teacher say a sentence then they have to drag the words on the screen into place to make a sentence.

Letter Way – A Fun Game to Practice Recognizing and Spelling Words

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letterway Letter Way is a fun and free iPad app to use to practice recognizing and spelling words. The game presents you with a grid of letter blocks that you have to flip and drag to spell words. The beginning levels of the game have grids of 25 letters. As you progress through the levels the grids expand and the number of words that you have to spell in each level increases too. To progress through the levels you have to clear the board by using all of the letters at least once.

letter way in action

In my testing of Letter Way it did not seem possible to time-out of a level which is a nice thing if you want students to focus on spelling words correctly without the stress of a time limit.

If Letter Way doesn’t offer what you’re looking for in a spelling game, take a look at this collection of eight spelling apps for iPads.

 

Play Magnus – Play and Learn Chess With a Grandmaster

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Screen Shot 2014-03-03 at 9.51.24 AM Play Magnus is a freemium iOS app that allows you to learn and play chess against chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen. The app contains video lessons that demonstrate both the basics of chess and advanced strategies of the game. After watching a lesson or two you can challenge Magnus to a game of chess. You can challenge Magnus at each age of his development from ages five through twenty-three. I was able to beat Magnus as a five year old. The twelve-years-old Magnus beat me rather quickly.

Play Magnus is listed in the App Store as an iPhone app, but it worked perfectly well on my iPad. Play Magnus offers an in-app purchase to remove ads (the ads appear between screens, not while playing a game) and in-app purchases to access advanced tutorials.

H/T to Open Culture.