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The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

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game creation

TinyTap Introduces Insights to Track Your Students’ Progress on the Games You Make

June 27, 2015 by admin

tinytap TinyTap is a great iPad app for developing your own educational games. I’ve been a big supporter of the app since it launched a couple of years ago. This week TinyTap introduced a new feature called Insights through which you can track your students’ use of your games. TinyTap Insights enables you create student groups, distribute activities to your students, and review your students’ progress on the activities that you assign to them. TinyTap Insights is a paid service, but you can get it for free this summer by referring others to the service.

More About TinyTap:
Through the app (also available for Android) you can build games by uploading pictures or taking new pictures that you arrange into sets. Then select each image to create questions about it. To create your question press the record button and start talking. When you have finished talking select a portion of your picture to serve as the answer. I created a small game about objects in my house. I took four pictures of things in my house. Each question asked players to identify the objects in my house. For example, when a player sees a picture of my kitchen he or she has to identify the tea pot by touching it.

TinyTap has options for creating Sound Boards and Shape Puzzles to go along with simple identification activities. A Sound Board is an image or set of images to which you add your voice. To create a Sound Board you highlight elements of a picture then record yourself talking about those elements. When a student views your Sound Board he or she can tap on highlighted portions of the image to hear you talking about them. This could be a great option for creating a narration of a flowchart or a diagram.

Shape Puzzles on Tiny Tap are games in which students have to drag pieces of an image into place in order to make the image whole. A great example of this is found in a Shape Puzzle about third grade sight words. Students hear the teacher say a sentence then they have to drag the words on the screen into place to make a sentence.

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Filed Under: Elementary School, Middle School Tagged With: educational games, free apps, free ipad apps, game creation, games, ipad apps, TinyTap

Create an Educational Game on TinyTap and You Could Win an iPad Mini

August 1, 2014 by admin

Screen Shot 2012-11-17 at 2.47.56 PM TinyTap is one of my favorite free iPad apps for elementary school teachers. Through TinyTap you can create your own educational games to share with students. Throughout the month of August, 2014 TinyTap is running a game creation contest for teachers. Every week TinyTap will award an iPad Mini to the teacher who creates and shares the best educational game on TinyTap. The complete contest rules are available here.

To create a game on TinyTap you upload pictures or take new pictures and arrange them into a set. Then select each image to create questions about it. To create your question press the record button and start talking. When you have finished talking select a portion of your picture to serve as the answer. I created a small game about objects in my house. I took four pictures of things in my house. Each question asked players to identify the objects in my house. For example, when a player sees a picture of my kitchen he or she has to identify the tea pot by touching it.

Evernote-Camera-Roll-20121117-124333

If you don’t have time to create your own games or you just want to see what others have done, you can browse the TinyTap Market. The TinyTap Market is where the games that you create for the contest mentioned above will appear.

Disclaimer: I do not have any affiliation with TinyTap. I just thought this is a good opportunity to pass along. 

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Filed Under: Elementary School, Pre-K Tagged With: free ipad apps, game creation, games, TinyTap

Turn Drawings Into Video Games With Pixel Press Floors

July 11, 2014 by admin

Screen Shot 2014-07-07 at 7.52.49 PM Pixel Press Floors is a promising new iPad app (currently free) that kids can use to turn drawings into pictures. This is the simple explanation of the service. Students draw on specially designed paper (printable) or draw in the app (designs printable). Students then use their iPads to see their drawings become games. Games can be shared with others through the Pixel Press arcade. Watch the video below to learn more about Pixel Press Floors.

Pixel Press Floors Trailer from Pixel Press on Vimeo.

Terri Eichholz has a good blog post about Pixel Press Floors in which she shares how her students used the app.

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Filed Under: Elementary School, High School, Middle School Tagged With: free ipad apps, game creation, games, ipad app

Stick Around – Play and Create iPad Puzzles

January 8, 2014 by admin

Screen Shot 2014-01-08 at 11.56.45 AM Stick Around is a new iPad app developed by Tony Vincent and Morris Cooke (the developer of the popular Explain Everything app). Stick Around gets its name of the sticker element of the app. The app contains educational puzzles that students solve by dragging stickers into the correct locations on the puzzles. The puzzles are essentially matching activities that can be customized by the teachers. The best aspect of the app is that teachers can create their own puzzles.

Evernote Camera Roll 20140108 121906

Stick Around contains eight sample puzzles. The sample puzzles can actually be played by students, but they seem to be included more as models of what teachers can create with the app. To create a puzzle in Stick Around start by selecting a puzzle format (columns, timeline, sequencing, size arrangement, Venn diagram). After choosing a format you can import a picture or draw a background for the puzzle. The puzzle is then built on top of your chosen background. Write your question and place them on the puzzle. Your answer key is created by creating stickers that your students will have to drag into place on your puzzle. The process wasn’t as intuitive as I thought it would be so I reverted to watching the built-in instructional screencast in order to understand how the puzzles came together.

Evernote Camera Roll 20140108 121914

Stick Around could be a great app for creating educational puzzles for your students to use as review exercises. I especially like the potential to create geography puzzles on the app.

Overall, the app has good features for students and teachers. My wish for a future enhancement is an option to give students instant feedback on puzzle completion progress. Currently, it seems that the only feedback that can be given is “puzzle correct” or “puzzle incorrect.” I would like to see students be able to get feedback like, “six of eight parts correct, correct these two parts.”

Stick Around is currently priced at $2.99.

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Filed Under: Elementary School, Middle School Tagged With: game creation, games, geography, ipad apps, puzzles, social studies

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