iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

ipad app

Explain 3D for iPad – Visual Explanations of Machines and Systems

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Screen Shot 2014-10-24 at 10.48.19 AM A few years ago Explain 3D launched as a website to showcase 3D animations of simple machines. Later the site expanded to include 3D animations of elements of the universe. This week Explain 3D launched a new iPad app for the same purpose as the website.

Explain 3D’s iPad app includes the same animations that you can find on the website. The animations allow viewers to zoom-in, zoom-out, and rotate animations 360 degrees. Students can manipulate animations of simple machines like elevators and hand pumps. The app also offers models and animations of space shuttles and the International Space Station. To help students learn about electricity Explain 3D offers 3D models nuclear power plants, wind turbines, and hydro-electric dams.

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Explain 3D could be a good source of models to include as part of a larger lesson that you’re constructing for your students to view online. To get the most out of the models your students will probably need you to explain what is happening and or the connections to the larger lesson.

New Collaborative Portfolios Added to WeLearnedIt

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welearnedit Back in August Adam Bellow launched a new iPad app called WeLearnedIt. Through the WeLearnedIt iPad app you and your students can create digital portfolios. This week a collaborative portfolio creation option was added to WeLearnedIt. WeLearnedIt portfolios can contain files from Google Drive, Dropbox, links from the web, images and videos captured with your iPad, and whiteboard videos created within the WeLearnedIt app. Watch the video below to see how the new portfolio option works.

The best aspects of WeLearnedIt are found in the feedback and sharing tools. Teachers can assign grades to elements of students’ digital portfolios. Grading is not limited to assigning scores. Teachers can give written feedback on each submission. Rubrics for assignments are available through the app too.  School-wide implementations (a fee-based option) of WeLearnedIt allow teachers and administrators to share assessment data.

Disclosure: I have a small advisory and equity interest in eduClipper (the parent company of WeLearnedIt). 

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.

Phraseology – A Writing App that Offers Text Analysis Tools

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Screen Shot 2014-04-03 at 2.39.38 PM Phraseology is an iPad app that doesn’t look like much more than a simple word processing app until you explore all of its handy little features. Phraseology provides a clean interface for creating documents. Once you’ve started creating a document you can take advantage of helpful editing and analysis tools built into the Phraseology app. Those tools include highlighting of the parts of speech in your document, a reading level indicator, and text arrangement tools.

When you have a document open in the Phraseology app you can tap a “target” icon to have nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, prepositions, and conjunctions highlighted throughout your document. You can choose to have one or all of those parts of speech highlighted in your document. Tap the “i” icon while viewing your document and you will see an analysis of the reading level of your document, a word count, and a break down of the frequency with which you used the various parts of speech in your document. Rearranging the text in your document is a simple matter of choosing a line and dragging it up or down (cut and paste is not required).

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Documents completed in Phraseology can be sent to your Google Drive or Evernote account where you can then share them as you would share anything else in those accounts. You can also share Phraseology documents via email or Airdrop.

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Phraseology currently costs $2.99

Gro Garden Teaches Student About Gardening

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Screen Shot 2014-04-01 at 8.46.31 AM Gro Garden is an iPad app designed to help students learn about gardening. The app features a virtual garden in which children plant seeds then water and fertilize the seeds until they become plants. Once the plants pop-up through the dirt students have to continue watering and fertilizing until the plants are ready to harvest. Students can control the amount of water and sunshine their plants receive throughout the virtual growing process.

After harvesting plants from their Gro Garden gardens students can take the plants and feed them to their hungry friends in the virtual cottage. Scraps from the meals can be composted to create fertilizer for the next growing season.

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As the spring approaches we’ll be noticing gardens popping-up all around us. Gro Garden could be a good app for students to use to learn what makes a garden grow.

Gro Garden is currently priced at $2.99.