iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

games

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

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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.

Geography Drive Arcade – Four Fun U.S. Geography Games

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arcade Geography Drive Arcade is a great iPad app from the same people that developed Geography Drive USA. Within Geography Drive Arcade students will find four fun review games. Those games are State Shape Challenge, Flagstaff State Flag Game, State Capital Challenge, and Honolulu Spelling Bee.

In the State Shape Challenge students see the silhouette of a state then have to identify it by choosing its name from a list. State Capital Challenge requires students to choose the name of the capital for the state shown to them. Honolulu Spelling Bee shows students the outline of a state and they have to correctly spell its name. Flagstaff State Flag Game, which is the one I found the most interesting, shows students five state flags and they have to choose the one belonging to the state shown to them.

hawaii

TinyTap Gets a Facelift – Create Your Own iPad Games for Older Students

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tinytap_new_logo 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. TinyTap has always been targeted toward the K-3 crowd, but it can certainly be used with older students too. To reflect that TinyTap has uses in older grades, the developers gave the app a bit of a facelift and added some new features.

TinyTap still works the way that it always has, but some of the decorations and animations that were included to appeal to young students are optional rather than default settings.

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.

TinyTap has added 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. See the screenshot below for an example of this.

shape_puzzle

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

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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. 

Turn Drawings Into Video Games With Pixel Press Floors

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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.