iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

free ipad apps

The Life of Art – An iPad App from The Getty Museum

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Screen Shot 2013-01-12 at 5.18.59 PM The Life of Art is a free iPad app that provides its users with an interactive introduction to four artifacts from The Getty’s Life of Art exhibit. The Life of Art app displays a lidded bowl, a silver fountain, a side chair, and a wall light. All four items are ornately decorated while also being functional. On the Life of Art app users can click through the parts of each artifact to learn more about the importance of the decoration and the functions of each artifact. For example, when users tap on the silver fountain they can learn about the coat of arms that is engraved on it, learn about the functions of the fountain, and even learn why it is called a fountain. Each object in the app can be rotated and zoomed in on for examination in further detail.

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The Life of Art app isn’t the most comprehensive app that you’ll find in the App Store, but it is well designed. Students of art history may find the free app enjoyable.

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Think Fast About the Past – An iPad Game About U.S. History

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think_fast Think Fast About the Past is a free iPad game about U.S. history. This free iPad app is the companion to the Mission U.S. website that offers interactive journeys through U.S. history.

Think Fast About the Past contains two “missions” for students to complete. The first mission is set in Boston in 1770. The mission is to find the mission dog named thimble before time expires. To find Thimble students have to correctly answer a series of questions about political and social topics of the 1770’s and 1780’s. For example, one question asks students how women supported the American Revolution.

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The second mission in Think Fast About the Past is set in Kentucky in 1850. In this mission students have to answer a series of questions about slavery, abolition, and the Civil War. The object is to answer all of the questions correctly in five minutes or less.

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Think Fast About the Past is a free iPad app. It’s appropriate for use with students in grades four through eight. I would use it as a review activity after teaching a unit of lessons on the American Revolution and the American Civil War.

Scrollshow – A Nice Free Alternative to Keynote for iPad

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Screen Shot 2012-12-21 at 11.25.28 AM Scrollshow is a neat presentation creation app for iPad. The idea behind Scrollshow is to present your slides as a continuous stream on top of a panoramic background. Unlike a typical slide presentation tool in which each slide is a separate entity, in Scrollshow the slides are integrated into the flow of a panoramic background. It kind of reminds of me Prezi. Learn more about Scrollshow in the video below.

Creating a Scrollshow presentation is similar to other slideshow creation apps. To get started select a theme and background. When you build your slides you’re really building frames within your background image. You’ll notice that the frame at the top of the editor moves with every new element that you add to your presentation. The frame is there to give you an idea of where each of your presentation elements will appear in the panorama.

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Scrollshow is a free app. For students of middle school age and higher it could be a good alternative to Keynote.

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Create Music Videos With Video Star

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Video Star is a fun and free music video creation app. To create a music video on Video Star just select a song that you have stored on your iPad then start shooting live video. The music will play for as long as you record or until the end of the song. You can also import images from your iPad to create your video. Video Star also lets you apply special effects to your video. Some of the effects that you can apply include text boxes, title boxes, frames around images, transitions, and split screens.

Your completed Video Star video can be exported to YouTube or sent to anyone via email.

Create Picture Stories With PicView

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PicView is a free iPad app that makes it easy to create simple photo stories. PicView allows you to create an audio recording about a picture. You can add narration to pictures that you take with your iPad or pictures that you already have in your iPad’s camera roll. Your images can be enhanced with some simple color filters, border designs, a title, and markers. Your completed PicView story can be shared via email, posted on the PicView site, shared on Facebook, or shared on Twitter.