iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

free app

Sound Uncovered – An iPad App for Learning About Sound

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Screen Shot 2013-04-09 at 4.51.52 PMSound Uncovered is a free iPad app from Exploratorium. In Sound Uncovered students can explore a series of interactive activities to learn about how sound travels and what makes us perceive sounds the ways that we do. Some of the highlights of the app are Find the Highest Note in which students play a series of notes to determine if there is a highest note (spoiler alert: there isn’t, but your ears will tell you otherwise). How Old Are Your Ears? is an interactive that explains why we lose hearing as we age. The Beat Goes On. And Off, And On… is an interactive in which students play a couple of different notes and learn how those notes are used my musicians to tune instruments.

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Sound Uncovered could be a great application not only for music classes, but also for science lessons.

Essential Skeleton – An Excellent iPad App for Students

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Screen Shot 2013-04-07 at 7.50.45 PM Essential Skeleton is a free iPad app that students studying the human skeletal system should download. The app puts a 3D skeleton on your students’ iPads. Students can zoom-in, zoom-out, and rotate the skeleton 360 degrees. When students zoom-in and tap on a bone they will see its name in English and Latin, have the option to hear an audio pronunciation of the bone’s name, learn about the connected bones, and write their own notes about the highlighted bone.

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Essential Skeleton is free to download and use. The developers offer a number of related apps that you may want to try. iMuscle might make a good companion to Essential Skeleton.

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The Poetry App – Discover Famous Poems and Poets

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Screen Shot 2013-04-05 at 1.42.18 PM The Josephine Hart Poetry App is a free iPad app that students can use to discover and read works of sixteen famous poets including Yeats, Byron, and Frost. Students can browse through the app to find a poet. When they find a poet students can click on that poet’s portrait to open a small biography and a selection of poems written by that poet. Students can read the poems and listen to narrations of the poems. Many of the poems are narrated by famous actors. Students can download the poems and audio recordings to use offline. Students can also organize poems into a collection of favorites in the Poetry App.

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Rocket Speller – Spell Words and Build Rockets

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Screen Shot 2013-04-02 at 8.27.10 AM Rocket Speller is a fun iPad app designed for students in Kindergarten through grade two. The purpose of the app is to help students learn to spell words simple words that are three to ten letters long. As students progress through the levels of the app they get stars. After they get three stars students pick out the parts they want to use to build a rocket ship.

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Rocket Speller has five levels for students to work through. The first level uses three to six letter words and gives audio and visual clues to students. The second level features words up to ten letters in length and offers audio and visual hints. The third through fifth levels have words up to ten letters in length but reduce the number of clues available to students.

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Autodesk Digital STEAM – 5 iPad Games for Simple Physics Lessons

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Screen Shot 2013-03-29 at 7.52.28 PM Autodesk Digital STEAM Applied Mechanics is a free iPad app that contains five simple games. The games are designed to let students experiment with five connected physics concepts. The concepts in the games are energy and work, force, power, loading, and mechanisms. In each game students control one variable to see how changing that variable affects other aspects of the equation.

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The five games that students can play are Energy & Work, Forces, Power, Loading, and Mechanisms. In Energy & Work students control how much hot air is pumped into a hot air balloon as it is pushed along by the wind. Students have to manage the rate at which fuel is burned so that the balloon doesn’t run out of hot air before the end of the game. The Forces  game has players using a catapult to lob meatballs (at least that’s what they look like to me). In the Loading game students use a crane to correctly distribute weight to waiting trucks. In Power players control the thrusters of a spaceship to navigate obstacles and safely land at a destination. And in the Mechanism game students maneuver a helicopter by controlling the ration of the gears powering the rotor.

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Autodesk Digital STEAM could be a good app for introducing elementary school students to some basic physics concepts.