iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

How-to

Book Creator Now Lets You Publish With One Tap

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Book Creator is a fantastic and popular iPad app for creating multimedia ebooks. In fact, more than 1,000,000 stories are created with the app every month. For years the only way to share the stories that students create was to turn their books into videos, publish them as PDFs, or publish them as ePub documents. All were fine options, but they required some extra steps in order for parents to see the books that their children made in your classroom. Last Friday that changed when Book Creator introduced a new option to publish Book Creator books online.

Book Creator books can now be published for easy online viewing. Publishing online essentially creates a webpage that you can share with your students’ parents so that they can view their students’ work on their tablets, phones, or laptops. It is important to note that students can’t publish their books independently. You, the teacher, have to publish the books on your students’ behalf from your Book Creator teacher account. Dan Kemp, the founder of Book Creator, is taking student privacy seriously and has published a statement about how Book Creator tries to protect students’ privacy.

Eventually, there will be a cost associated with publishing Book Creator books online. For now, you can publish ten books for free. Directions for publishing online can be found here.

How to Make a Screencast of Your iPad’s Screen

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ipad-606766_640One of the best ways to help people learn how to use an app or complete a workflow process on an iPad is to show them. Every year schools have workshops dedicated to showing teachers how to use their iPads. The trouble comes after the workshop is over and teachers have forgotten a key step or two. The solution to this problem is to create screencast videos that teachers can refer to throughout the school year.  There are a couple of ways that you can create a screencast video of your iPad’s screen.


Method 1 – If you have a Mac computer:

Connect your iPad to your Mac by using the Lightning cable (the cable that came with your iPad). Then open QuickTime on your Mac. Next select “new movie recording” from the QuickTime menu. You can then choose the name of your iPad and click record. When you’re done recording your new screencast will save to your computer as a video file that you can then edit in iMovie if you want to cut out portions of it or lay a music track under your narration.


Method 2 – If you have a Windows computer:

You will need a third-party service that allows you to mirror your iPad to the screen of your Windows computer. Air Server is the service that I recommend for mirroring an iPad to a Windows computer. Air Server includes a recording tool that  you can use to make a screencast video of your iPad’s screen. With Air Server running you can just tap record and instantly start capturing your screen and your narration. The video will save on your Windows computer where you can then edit it and or upload it to your favorite video hosting service.

How to Move a GarageBand Recording to SoundCloud

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garagebandI recently had someone email me because she was looking for help moving GarageBand recordings off of her students’ iPads. One solution is to send the recordings to a SoundCloud account. Once you have created a SoundCloud account the process of moving recordings from GarageBand to SoundCloud is rather straight-forward. The screenshots below provide instructions on the steps to take to move a GarageBand recording from an iPad to a SoundCloud account.

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iOS 8 Tips and Tricks for Teachers and Students

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clock-419681_640Have you recently updated your iPad to iOS 8? Have your students’ iPads been updated to iOS 8? If so, Tony Vincent has a great overview of some of the “hidden” features of the iOS 8 that teachers and students will find to be helpful to them. Tony’s video is embedded below. You can read the transcript of the video here.

5 Ways Teachers Can Use their iPads Professionally

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chaos-391652_640This is a guest post from Jennifer Carey (@TeacherJenCarey) and EdTechTeacher, an advertiser on this site.

iPads are powerful tools for teachers in the classroom. In addition to being robust, mobile creation devices for students, they help you to stay organized, be on top of your classes, create content and lessons, focus on continued learning, and build your PLN. Here are five ways to turn your iPad into a robust, education machine!

Organize Yourself

You can easily sync your Outlook or Google Calendar to your iPad by going to iPad Settings → Mail, Contacts, & Calendar → Add Account. This allows you to add multiple work, personal, and/or shared calendars to the calendar on your iPad, giving you mobile access to all of your appointments (personal and professional) on a single calendar. You will also be able to make changes on the go, and with cloud based platforms, you won’t have to remember to sync your device to your computer as all changes are updated automatically.

By using the Reminder app, you can schedule notifications weeks, months, even years in advance! One of my favorite features of Reminder is that in addition to alarms based on date/time, you can set a reminder notification based on location (don’t forget to buy milk at the grocery store or to take your gym shoes as you leave your house in the morning). If you want to conquer more robust tasks, look at investing in one of the popular To-Do List apps such as Wunderlist, Things, or Trello.

Organize your Class

Even if your school does not have a formal LMS, there are numerous free tools that allow you to organize a class calendar, have students check and submit homework assignments, share content and materials, keep attendance, track students, and even send robust reports to advisors, administrators, and/or parents. Some of the most popular and comprehensive LMS’s available include Schoology, Teacherkit, and Edmodo. While Google Classroom does not yet have a formal app, you can still access it using your iPad’s browser (while Safari is the default, I find that it works best using the Chrome iOS browser).

Create Class Content

iPads are not just mobile, creation devices for students; they are a powerful tool in the hands of a teacher. You can easily build both traditional and creative lessons for your classes. Keynote, Google Slides, PowerPoint (creation abilities require a subscription to Office 365), and/or Prezi allow you to create class presentations rich with text, images, charts, graphs, and video!

Additionally, you can easily make flipped content using tools such as iMovie, Notability, Explain Everything, or Educreations. These apps allow you to share content to cloud services such as YouTube, Vimeo, or Google Drive. From there, you can post to your course website or LMS (using one of the tools listed above) or share via Google Drive.

Manage your Professional Development

Great educators are lifelong learners. It’s easy to keep up with your own learning and professional development goals using iPad. With eReader Apps such as Kindle, iBooks, Nook, or Overdrive, you can access a myriad of electronic texts on your mobile device. Even better, you are not limited to a single platform or provider. Your local library may even offer eBooks on loan! In addition to texts, be sure to check out the variety of content offered via Podcasts and iTunes U. You can readily access content related to educational theory and topics, or your own areas of interest (History, Math, Politics, etc). Also, be sure to check out the variety of resources published via iPad apps such as Ted or PBS.

Manage your PLN

Keeping up with your Personal Learning Network (PLN) can feel daunting. However, iPad allows you to access your PLN using a variety of tools. With stand alone apps like Twitter, Diigo, Facebook, Feedly, or Pocket, you can easily share and consume resources on the fly. However, I also like to use an app called Flipboard that enables me to see my Social Media, Blog posts, and News Resources in a magazine-like interface. You can learn more about navigating your PLN in this article on Edutopia.

iPads are powerful tools in the educational environment, not just for students, but also for teachers. Harnessing the power of iPad can help you to stay more organized, meet your classroom goals, and manage your own professional development on a single, portable device.

To learn more about these ideas, and more, check out the November 12-14 EdTechTeacher iPad Summit in Boston where I will be a Featured Speaker.