iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

free apps

Seesaw TV for Apple TV – A Good Way to Showcase Students’ Work

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seesaw app icon Over the last two school years Seesaw has quickly become a favorite tool for creating digital portfolios. Some of the great features in Seesaw include letting students join your classroom account by simply scanning a QR code, letting students add voice notes to artifacts in their portfolios, and enabling students to share portfolio artifacts directly to a classroom blog managed by their teachers.

Seesaw recently released an option for displaying portfolio artifacts through Apple TV. Seesaw TV can be found in the Apple TV App Store. Through Seesaw TV you can display student work, add emoji comments to their work, show slideshows of all of your students’ work or an individual student’s work, and view all details about an artifact.

Seesaw TV could provide you with a good way for students to give a presentation about their favorite lessons of the year or the work that they are most proud of.

PBS Students – Discover Educational Resources on Your iPad

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pbs students 1 Parts of this post originally appeared on my other blog, FreeTech4Teachers.com.

PBS Students is a new iPad app designed to showcase some of the best educational content for students. Through the app students and teachers can search for educational videos, articles, and diagrams. Some of the the video content can be downloaded directly to an iPad. The app was initially launched two weeks ago and it was updated this week. The update fixed an issue with some content shown in the app not being accessible when selected. The other update is the inclusion of a Puzzle Builder tool.

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The Puzzle Builder is an addition to PBS Learning Media’s Storyboard tool which allows you to create a collection of videos, text, and images organized around almost any topic of your choosing. The collections that you or your students create appear in a collage-like format. The storyboards function is nice for students who are over the age of 13 as they can save their collections in the app and online. Unfortunately, students who are under the age of 13 cannot save their storyboards.

A Helpful New Feature Coming to the Google Drive iPad App

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Screen Shot 2014-09-22 at 8.28.40 AM In a week full of Google Apps updates, here comes another one. According to the Google Apps update blog, over the next week the Google Drive iOS app will add the option to select multiple files for offline use. Enhanced file organization functions will be added to the app too.

This might not seem like a huge update to the app, but it will be helpful to students who don’t have regular access to the Internet at home. Likewise, it could be a good back-up plan for those times when your school’s network bogs down or crashes entirely. Just make sure that you remind students to select files for offline access before they go offline.

Click here to learn more about the Google Drive iOS app.

Classify It! – A Fun App for Learning to Classify Plants and Animals

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classify Classify It! is a free iPad app designed to help elementary school and middle school students learn to classify plants and animals. In the app students are given a question and shown a selection of plants and animals. Respond to the question students have to correctly identify the plants and animals that answer the question. For example, on the second level of the game students are asked to identify the animals that are mammals and they then have to select the mammals from a gallery of pictures. If students need help understanding the question or prompt on a level, they can tap the question mark icon to receive a bit of clarification.

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Creature Cards provide an incentive to students to complete each level of Classify It! with 100% accuracy. When students complete a level with 100% accuracy they receive Creature Cards. Creature Cards are essentially trading cards that feature a plant or animal picture along with some information about it. Students can make as many attempts as they need in order to complete a level with 100% accuracy.

Try Classkick for Distributing Assignments & Feedback Through Your iPad

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classkick

Parts of this post originally appeared on my other blog, FreeTech4Teachers.com

Classkick is a free service for creating, distributing, and assessing students’ work through iPads. Through Classkick you can create an online classroom through which you distribute assignments to students. Students join your class by entering your class code into the Classkick app on their iPads.

The assignments that you create in Classkick can be based on screenshots, imported images, drawings, text, or voice recordings. Classkick lets you see what your students are working on within the app. You can give students feedback on their assignments directly through the app. Students can ask you for help while working in the app too.

For classrooms that have iPads for every student, Classkick could be a great tool not only for distributing assignments but also for providing individualized feedback to students while they are working. The option to record your voice to create questions could be a great aid to students who struggle with reading but would otherwise be able to answer a question or explain a process to you.