iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

free apps

Math Vocabulary Cards – A Math Review App in English and Spanish

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math vocab Math Vocabulary Cards is a free iPad app designed for elementary school students. The app offers exactly what its name implies, a series of flashcards of mathematics vocabulary terms. Each card contains a term, a diagram, and a definition. By default the term is hidden and students have to guess the term based on the definition and diagram. Students can also use the cards with the definitions hidden and the terms revealed.

metric system

Math Vocabulary Cards can be used in Spanish or English. Simply select a language at the bottom of each card. Students can browse through the entire gallery of flashcards or choose a specific category of terms to study.

vocab selection

JFK Challenge Teaches Students About the Space Race and Peace Corps

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jfk JFK Challenge is a new iPad app designed to help elementary and middle school students learn about the Apollo missions and the Peace Corps. The free app features a series of games for learning about each program. I played the first couple of games about the Peace Corps and the first couple of games about the Apollo missions. The games are nice, but I think that the real value of the app is found in the introductory materials that appear before the games.

peace corps

To get the full value out of the JFK Challenge students should not skip the introduction to the app or the introductory materials that appear before the games. The introductory text, images, and audio provide the historical context and significance of each program.

To The Brink is a related app that teaches students about President Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Paper – A Sketching App Now Free for Everyone

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paper Paper is an iPad app for sketching and creating free-hand outlines. I’ve seen a lot of people use it over the last year, but I couldn’t get myself to pay for it when there were other good sketching apps available for free. Last night I received an email from Paper’s marketing department in which they announced that the app is now completely free to use. All of the in-app purchases have been made free too.

Paper can be used to sketch notes, draw pictures, or write outlines in notebooks in the app. I like using apps like Paper because sketching notes allows me to create outlines in any format that I like, quickly connect ideas through arrows and lines, and illustrate ideas when words aren’t enough. Sketchnoting on an iPad enables me to edit and share sketched notes more quickly and easily than ever before.

Learn more about Paper in the video embedded below. If you decide to install Paper, I highly recommend going through the tutorials before using the app. I tried skipping the tutorials and I was confused by some aspects of the app.

Mix by FiftyThree / Create Together from FiftyThree on Vimeo.

Rugged Rovers – Design and Test Space Rovers

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rugged rovers Rugged Rovers is a free iPad app in which students can create simple designs for space rovers. Students draw a design for their rovers then add up eight wheels to it before taking it for a virtual test drive. Students test their rover designs by driving them across a Mars spacescape. To help their rovers over obstacles students can use a small power booster. The power booster must be used in moderation because it cannot instantly recharge. The object of the activity is to design a rover that can travel as far as possible. When students get their rovers stuck, they can go back and try a new design.

rugged rovers 2

Rugged Rovers could be a fun little app for students to use to see how balance and engine strength work together to influence how Mars rovers travel.

Try RefME’s iPad App for Quickly Organizing Reference Lists

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refme RefME is a service designed to help students create citations and organize bibliographies. The free RefME iPad app enables students to scan the barcode on a book, periodical, CD cases, and many other media cases to have a citation formatted for that item. RefME provides more than 6,500 citation and bibliography formats for students to use.

I tried RefME’s free iPad app this afternoon and found it easy to use. To get started open the app and create a RefME account. After creating an account create your first project in RefME. A project is essentially a folder for the citations that you are going to create for a paper. Select your project then add a reference by scanning the barcode on a book or other media. When you have finished scanning all of your references (you can also add references manually) you can export your list of citations to Evernote, email the list to yourself, or create a Word document from the RefME website.

reme in action

RefME could be a fantastic tool for students to use as they develop research projects. The app could be particularly handy when students are using books or periodicals that the cannot take out of the library.