iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

ipad app

The Human Body – An Anatomy App for Kids

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Screen Shot 2013-09-23 at 8.29.56 AM The Human Body by Tinybop is an iPad app designed to help elementary and middle school students learn human anatomy. The app features interactive diagrams of the major systems of the human body. A few of the things that students can see on the app are how lungs breathe, the heart beats, and the ears hear. One of the features that I liked is that through the app students will also see how the feeling of a touch of the hand is received in the brain. Students can turn layers and labels on and off throughout the app.

Tinybop offers a free PDF handbook to go along with The Human Body app. The handbook provides more information about the things featured in the app as well as activity and discussion prompts for teachers.

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The Human Body App provides an option for parents to create accounts to monitor how their children use the app. Parents can authorize an in-app purchase to add kidneys, bladders and genitals to the app (by default that information is not enabled).

Frame Artist – An App for Editing Images and Creating Collages

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Screen Shot 2013-09-10 at 9.14.30 AM Frame Artist is a nice iPad app (free and paid versions are available) for editing images and creating collages. The app provides two dozen templates. If the pre-made templates don’t suit your style you can create your own. Whether you use one of the stock templates or you create your own, you can add stickers, fonts, and filters to your images.

When I opened Frame Artist the magazine template caught my eye. I used the template to quickly assemble a magazine cover that features my dogs. Students could use the magazine template to create a cover for a document or to create an opening slide for a presentation.

Frame Artist allows you to import pictures from your camera roll, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, and Instagram. You can also search the web for pictures through the Frame Artist app. When your collage is complete you can share it to all of the popular social networks, email it, or save it to your camera roll. The free version of Frame Artist allows you to save five projects. There is not a limit to how many projects you can save if you purchase the pro version of Frame Artist.

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Thanks to Shelly Terrell for sharing Frame Artist on Google+ over the weekend.

BigMind – An Intuitive Mind Mapping iPad App

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bigmind I’m a big fan of mind mapping as a method for organizing thoughts, connecting concepts, and visualizing the big picture of concept. In fact, I think the mind mapping process is so valuable that I created an entire workshop about it. One of the mind mapping iPad apps that I often recommend is Popplet. Recently, I tried BigMind and I think that it could challenge Popplet in popularity.

BigMind allows to create mind maps by using one of their eight templates or by creating a mind map from scratch. Whether you work from a template or start with a blank canvas, the features of BigMind are the same. To add a bubble to your mind map just tap the screen. Each bubble can include text and pictures. Double tap on a bubble to open the menu for inserting pictures. While you have that menu open you can also change the colors and borders of a bubble in your mind map. Adding related (child and sibling) bubbles is just a matter of tapping the up, down, or side arrows next to each of the bubbles in your mind map.

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All of your BigMind mind maps can be password protected. BigMind mind maps can be saved to Google Drive, Box, or Dropbox. BigMind mind maps can also be saved as images on your iPad.

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BigMind is currently listed at $4.99.

Storytelling Fun With Foldify for iPad

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foldify Foldify is an iPad app that students can use to design all kinds of 3D figures on their iPads. After designing their figures students can print their designs with directions for folding their designs into 3D paper objects. Foldify provides basic templates for objects like cars, houses, and people. Students complete the templates by coloring them in, adding their own pictures to the templates, and adding fun digital stamps to the templates.

I first learned about Foldify from a student who used it to create a bunch of characters and buildings that he then used in a video that he made. In his video he and other students provided the voices for each character.

Foldify is not a free app. It currently costs $3.99. Contrary to what one of the reviewers of the app posted on the review page, you can email a PDF of a design and print it from any printer.

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10monkeys – A Fun Math App for Elementary School Students’ iPads

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tenmonkeys 10monkeys is an iPad app that elementary school students will enjoy using to practice their multiplication skills. The premise of the game is that students have to free the monkeys by correctly answering multiplication questions as quickly as possible. Students earn points for accuracy and speed. As students progress through the game they progress through the multiplication tables of two through ten. The last level mixes up problems from all of the previous levels. 10monkeys provides multiplication tables as references for students to use when they get stuck on a level.

10monkeys doesn’t offer anything that many other multiplication game apps offers, but it is a lot of fun to play. Give it a try, I think your students will like it.

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