iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

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Try Book Creator for iPad for Free

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Screen Shot 2013-08-15 at 8.37.01 PM Book Creator for iPad is my favorite iPad app for creating narrated multimedia books on my iPad. Book Creator costs $4.99 (less with volume purchasing), but you can now try it and create one entire book for free. If you’re trying to convince someone in your school that Book Creator is worth purchasing, have that person try the free version first.

Book Creator allows anyone to create their own books using images, text, videos, 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.

Book Creator allows you to export your books to ePub 3.0 format. The exported file can be opened an 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.

CK-12 Study Now! – An Independent Study App for Students

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ck12_study CK-12 Study Now! is a free iPad app from the Ck-12 Foundation. The free iPad app puts CK-12 Flexbooks (multimedia books) on students’ iPads. Students can browse the app by subject and topic. Each Flexbook has to be downloaded individually to students’ iPads.

In some cases CK-12 Flexbooks can be a good alternative to buying textbooks. In other cases they make good supplementary material for your lessons. Either way, CK-12 Study Now! can help you and your students find helpful reference material.

As others have reported, I found the app to be crash-prone. Hopefully, this will be fixed soon.

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Create Fun Flipbooks With Animator for iPad

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Screen Shot 2013-02-01 at 7.13.54 PMAnimator for iPad is a nice app for creating flipbooks on your iPad. Animator provides a blank canvas on which you can draw and paint anything you like. When you tap “next” to create the next page in your flipbook you still see a faded version of your previous page. That view of the previous page is helpful for sequencing your drawings to create a story built in the same way that old cartoons were created one scene at a time. After you have created all of your pages you can preview your flipbook, adjust the speed at which each page is flipped, and add a soundtrack to your flipbook. Soundtracks have to be created outside of Animator and imported into your flipbook. I simply imported a music track that I had on my iPad when I tested Animator.

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Animator could be a great app for students to use to create and illustrate short stories on their iPads. If you want students to add some narration or music to their Animator flipbooks, have them use SoundCloud to make recordings to use in Animator. Finished Animator projects can be saved directly on an iPad or shared via email.