iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

free ipad app

Penguin Jump Maths – A Fun Game for Practicing Basic Math Skills

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penguin jump Penguin Jump Maths is a free iPad app that offers a fun game for students to play to practice their addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division skills. Students play the game in the role of a penguin trying to jump from iceberg to iceberg. The object of the game is to be the first penguin to make it across all of the icebergs without falling into the water. In addition to measuring success by being the first to cross the icebergs players also earn points for speed and accuracy.

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Penguin Jump Maths isn’t a revolutionary app by any means. But if you’re looking for a fun and free app for your students to use to practice their basic math skills, the app could provide just what you need.

Adobe Voice Now Offers Theme Customizations

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Back in May Adobe launched a free iPad app called Adobe Voice. Adobe Voice allows you to record your voice, import pictures, and write text to create a short video. The latest update to the app allows you to customize the background colors in your story’s theme. In addition to background colors you can also customize font colors and the colors of stock icons in the app.

To create a story with Adobe Voice you start by select a story template (you can change templates at any time). After choosing a template you construct your story by recording your narration for a frame then adding an image or text to the frame. You can import your own image, take a picture, or select one of the stock images provided by Adobe Voice. To find a stock image or icon you simply enter a search word and then select from the search results. In that regard it is similar to Haiku Deck’s image search tool. If you decide to add text to a frame, the text will automatically resize as you type. Music is automatically added to the background of your narrated Adobe Voice story. You can change the music by tapping the edit option and selecting a different track.

A Visual Math Glossary for Your iPad

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Screen Shot 2014-11-03 at 6.47.30 PM For years Jenny Eather’s A Maths Dictionary for Kids has been a favorite resource of mine and many other teachers for years. Maths Charts by Jenny Eather is the iPad companion to the website.

Math Charts by Jenny Eather provides simple and clear definitions of math terms. Each definition includes a diagram to illustrate the term’s definition. You can print any and all of the visuals included in the app.

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The first few charts in each section of the app are free. You do have to buy the full version of the app in order to unlock all of  charts in Math Charts by Jenny Eather.

Congressional Moments for iPad – Learn to Identify Primary Sources

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Screen Shot 2014-10-27 at 9.50.00 AM Congressional Moments is a free iPad app that features key Congressional activities that still affect our lives today. The app includes videos about six important areas. Those areas are the National Parks Service, Civil Rights, Child Labor, the Marshall Plan, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The videos are a nice part of the app, but my favorite aspects of the app are the sections designed to help students learn to distinguish the difference between primary and secondary sources.

Three sections of the Congressional Moments iPad app are designed to teach students the differences between primary and secondary sources and their roles in research. The “explore primary sources” section shows students a resource and asks them to choose if that source is a primary source or not. Students receive instant feedback with explanations of the correct answers. In “hear from the experts” students can watch a series of videos featuring two scholars explaining how to identify and use primary sources in research. The primary sources gallery in Congressional Moments features photos, drawing, letters, and maps arranged according to the themes included in the videos at the beginning of the app.

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The “think about it” section of the Congressional Moments iPad app asks students to use the information they read and watched in the previous parts of the app. The “think about it” section contains questions that teachers can use as the basis for lessons on the Congressional activities featured throughout the app.

Create Interesting Infographics and Slides With Canva for iPad

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canva Cross-post from my other blog, FreeTech4Teachers.com

Canva is a great service for creating infographics, slides, and photo collages. The service launched last fall and has steadily grown since then. The latest update to Canva was the launch of their free iPad app.

The Canva iPad app allows you to create infographics, slides, and photo collages in much the same way as the web version of the service. To create a graphic on Canva s tart by selecting a template then dragging and dropping into place background designs, pictures, clip art, and text boxes. Canva offers a huge library of clip art and photographs to use in your designs (some of the clip art is free, some is not). You can also import your own images to use in your graphics. Your completed Canva projects can be saved as PDF and PNG files. You can also simply link to your online graphic.

Canva can be used in many types of student projects. Students could use Canva to design covers for slidedecks or covers for reports. Students can use Canva to create infographics to highlight elements of their research projects. Creating flyers to advertise a school event is another possible use of Canva by students.