iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

elementary school

Scratch Jr is Now Available as an iPad app

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Screen Shot 2014-07-30 at 10.54.21 PM Scratch Jr, the popular programming environment for kids, is now available as an iPad app. Scratch Jr for iPad uses the same drag and drop programming principles used in Scratch. On Scratch Jr students can program multimedia stories and games.

To program a story or game on Scratch Jr students select background settings for each frame of the story. Then in each frame students select the actions that they want their characters to take. Students snap programming pieces together to make characters move and talk in their stories and games.

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Scratch offers a great way to introduce students to programming and logic. Scratch Jr for iPad makes it easy to introduce those same concepts to elementary school students.

H/T to Danny Nicholson.

CyberChase Shape Quest – An Educational Augmented Reality Game

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Screen Shot 2014-01-14 at 8.46.38 PM CyberChase Shape Quest is a fun and free iPad app from PBS Kids. The app contains three fun games for students from ages six through nine. All three of the games are designed to help students gain a better understanding of shapes, angles, and spatial relationships.

The highlight of the app is Patch the Path. In Patch the Path students use the camera on their iPads to navigate a printed game board (available here) while learning about shapes. The game features three dimensional objects that students manipulate on their iPads.

The other two games in CyberChase Shape Quest are Feed the Critters and Hide and Seek. In Feed the Critters students have to use their knowledge of angles to bounce treats to animals in the most direct manner possible. In Hide and Seek students have to pick out the shapes and angles that are hidden within a larger shape or drawing.

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Three Free Halloween iPad Apps for Kids

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carveHalloween will be here in ten days. If you’re looking for some Halloween-themed iPad apps for your elementary school students, take a look at these three free Halloween iPad apps.

Math vs. Zombies is a free 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.

Halloween Word Search is a simple word search application that has a Halloween theme. The app contains a series of word searches in which all of the words in the app have a Halloween theme.

Carve a Pumpkin allows students to carve virtual pumpkins. There are five types of pumpkins to choose from. Students can carve their pumpkins using templates in the app or they can carve free-hand. Students can select from a gallery of googly eyes, noses, and mouths to add to each design. Students can share their designs with friends through email.

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Shiny Party – A Fun iPad App for Learning Shapes

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Screen Shot 2013-07-24 at 9.19.23 PM Shiny Party is an iPad app created to help young students learn to recognize shapes. The app has a story mode and a game mode. In the story mode students help the story’s characters, Alice and Charlie, find presents and balloons for the party. In the story students have to identify the presents by their shapes.

The game mode of Shiny Party students practice identifying shapes through puzzles and matching games. In the game mode, as in the story mode, students identify shapes by coloring them in on their iPads.

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Shiny Party is currently priced at $1.99.

Online Safety With Professor Garfield

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Screen Shot 2013-06-27 at 9.09.00 PM Professor Garfield is a free resource developed in part by the Virginia Department of Education. Professor Garfield teaches students how to be safe online, how to recognize and respond to cyberbullying, and how to decide if something is a fact or an opinion. These educational activities can be done online or on free Professor Garfield apps; Online Safety, Fact or Opinion, Cyberbullying.

All of the free Professor Garfield iPad apps use the same format. The format is a set of comic strips that students read to learn about the issues the app is focused on. At the end of the comic strips students play some simple games to practice recognizing good online behaviors.

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