iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

ipad app

Create Comics in the Latest Version of Book Creator for iPad

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book_creator The popular Book Creator iPad app received a great update this week. The full version of Book Creator now includes tools for creating comics. The comic creation tools include a large selection of layouts, speech bubbles, drawing tools, stamps, and stickers. You can even include your own pictures in the comics that you create in Book creator. Watch the video embedded below to learn more about the comics creation option in Book Creator.

Book Creator allows you to export your books to ePub format. The exported file can be opened and read in the Chrome web browser using the free Readium browser extension. This is a great option as it allows a parent who doesn’t have an iPad at home to view his or her child’s work at home.

Firo – An Excellent App for Creating Music Tracks

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firo Firo is an app, currently free, for creating music on your iPad. I’ve tried a lot of music creation apps over the years, Firo is as good or better than all of them.

Firo is intended to be a full-fledged music creation tool. It doesn’t contain tutorials or lessons on making music, that is up to you. What Firo provides is twelve instruments that you can play on the app’s digital keyboard. The keyboard includes keys for one-touch creation of chords to lay down as context for the rest of the song that you’re creating. You can create and record loops to as harmony to the melody you’re creating. Or you can reverse that and play your melody on a loop while working on your song’s harmony.

Completed Firo projects can be saved on your iPad, shared on SoundCloud, opened in iMovie, or saved as MIDI files to use in other projects.

Firo could be an excellent app for use in music classes in which students are learning about composition. The app could also be helpful in developing music for use in video projects.

Read Your Own PDFs and EPUBs in Google Play Books for iPad

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Screen Shot 2014-12-04 at 5.42.54 PM For the last 18 months Google has allowed you to upload your own PDFs and EPUB files to your personal Google Books account. Unfortunately, you could only access those uploaded files through a web browser or on the Google Books Android app. That has changed with the latest update to Google Play Books for iPad. The latest update to Google Play Books for iPad enables you to read your uploaded files through the app.

Other updates to the app include the option to categorize and sort books, double-tap to zoom, and a new material design to match that of other Google products like Google Drive.

Uploading PDFs and EPUBs to your Google Play account could be a good way to get things like public domain works found on Project Gutenberg from your desktop to your iPad.

H/T to The Next Web. 

News-O-Matic – Daily News for Kids in English and Spanish

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Screen Shot 2014-10-28 at 6.42.42 PM News-O-Matic is a service that offers daily news stories for elementary school students. Along with the news stories News-O-Matic provides videos, games, and quizzes to help students learn about the world. The latest update to the News-O-Matic iPad app introduced an option to quickly switch between an English and a Spanish version of the app.

News-O-Matic does a good job of offering students a number of options for learning about the topic of a chosen news article. When students choose articles from the News-O-Matic homescreen they are taken directly to that article where they can then read the article as is or choose to have it read aloud to them. A menu to the right of each article contains access to additional features like a summary of key facts, tools for highlighting sections of the article, and slideshows and videos related to the topic of the chosen article.

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News-O-Matic is a subscription service. The app is free to install and use for accessing some articles. A subscription is required in order to unlock all of the app’s features.

Create Halloween Movies With Magisto for iPad

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Screen Shot 2014-10-28 at 2.36.30 PM Earlier today I published a post on FreeTech4Teachers.com in which I mentioned using Magisto to create videos online. This afternoon I tested out the Magisto iPad app.

The Magisto iPad app works in a manner that is very similar to the web app. To create a movie with the Magisto iPad app you simply select videos and images that are on your iPad’s camera roll, select some music (Magisto has a large selection of royalty-free music) to serve as your video’s soundtrack, and choose a theme for your movie. Magisto is currently offering a Halloween theme that you can apply to your movie. Magisto handles all of the mixing of your media to generate a movie for you. See the app in action in the video embedded below.

You can test the Magisto iPad app without creating an account. To access all of the app’s features you will have to create an account.