iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

ipad app

Create Full Feature Stop-Motion Videos On Your iPad

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Screen Shot 2014-03-20 at 10.27.12 PM The National Film Board of Canada recently released a fantastic new iPad app for creating stop-motion videos. NFB StopMo Studio allows you to take a series of pictures and stitch them together to create a stop-motion video. Like similar apps you can adjust the number of images that are displayed per second.

Where the app really shines is in the post-image editing options. NFB StopMo Studio allows you to use multiple soundtracks in your video. You can also draw or type on top of each image in your video.

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NFB StopMo Studio could be a great app for students to use to create short claymation-style videos to animate a story that they have written in your classroom.

Veggie Bottoms – An Interactive Story About Fruits and Vegetables

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Screen Shot 2014-02-24 at 9.39.31 AM Veggie Bottoms is a cute interactive story designed to teach students about fruits and vegetables. On each page of the story students learn about the characteristics and health benefits of a new vegetable or fruit. Students can manipulate the image of each fruit and vegetable in the app. For example, on the page about peas students open the pea pod. Each image talks to students too.

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Veggies Bottoms could be a good app to use as part of an elementary school lesson about healthy food choices. Veggie Bottoms currently costs $0.99.

Who Has What? – An App for Keeping Track of Borrowed Materials

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Screen Shot 2014-02-05 at 5.30.39 PM I can’t tell you how many books, CDs (remember when we used those to listen to music?), and DVDs I’ve lent out and never seen again. Who Has What? 2 is an iPad app that could help me keep track of those things from now on. Who Has What? 2 allows me to create an inventory of the things that I lend by taking pictures of them or scanning their barcodes (the barcode function didn’t work as well as I hoped when I tested it). Once an item is in my inventory when I lend it out I just select it on my iPad, enter the name and or email address of the person I’m lending it to, and set a due date for that item. From the iPad I can send due date reminders to the people that I’ve lent my items to.

Who Has What? 2 doesn’t appear to have an efficient way to upload a large inventory list so it’s not a replacement for a school library catalog system. That said, Who Has What? 2 could be a great app to use for keeping track of items that you lend from your classroom.

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Who Has What? 2 is currently priced at $0.99

Truss Me – An App for Designing and Testing Weight-bearing Structures

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Screen Shot 2013-12-11 at 12.02.54 PM Truss Me is an iPad app that students can use to design and test simple weight-bearing structures. Truss Me can be used in “challenge” mode or in “free play” mode. The challenge mode contains fifteen activities in which students are awarded points for strength and efficiency of their structures. For example, if a structure holds the weight but uses too many parts it doesn’t receive as many points as a structure using fewer parts while supporting the same weight. Structures that won’t work at all fall apart.

Truss Me is a nice iPad app that could be used as part of a simple physics lesson. I would like to see the app offer more instruction to students in terms of why a particular structure design is better or worse than another.

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Simple Physics is a similar app that you might also want to try.

Both apps in this post are currently priced at $1.99

Toonia Storymaker – Create, Read, and Share Illustrated Stories

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toonia_storymaker Toonia Storymaker is a cute iPad app that children can use to create short illustrated stories. To create stories on Toonia Storymaker children choose pre-drawn characters and settings for their stories. The characters can be dropped into multiple settings within the same story. The appearance of the characters in Toonia Storymaker can be edited. Once a character and setting is chosen children can type their stories in the speech bubbles. When the story is complete it can be emailed to parents and teachers or simply saved in the app.

Toonia Storymaker does not require children to start every story from scratch. The app offers a couple of pre-made stories that children can read and edit. Any story that a child saves on the app can be revisited and edited at anytime. In that way you could have students craft a story, email it to you, and then you can give them suggested edits for their stories. Doing that could make using Toonia Storymaker a fun way for students to develop their creative writing skills.

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Toonia Storymaker is currently listed at $2.99.