iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

ipad app

123D Creature – Create 3D Models on Your iPad

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Screen Shot 2013-05-10 at 8.47.46 PM A few years ago I gave one of my U.S. History classes an assignment to create short videos to recruit people to join Lewis & Clark’s Corps of Discovery. The assignment was designed to get students thinking about what it might have been like to plan for and go on that expedition. I gave my students free reign to create their videos however they wanted to. I had one young man in that class who created models on his computer, printed them, then used those models as the action figures in his video. It was a great little video and I wish that I had saved it. That student’s project was the first thing that I thought about when Fred Delventhal shared 123D Creature on Google+.

123D Creature is an iPad app produced by Autodesk which also produced 123D Catch. Using 123D Creature students can draw three dimensional model creatures on their iPads. The creatures start with a basic skeleton and the app users take it from there. Models can have many limbs, colors, positions, and special effects added to them. When the model is complete it can be saved and or printed.

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If your students are writing short, science fiction stories they could use 123D Creature to create some models to use in their stories. This app does require iOS 6.0 or later.

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Vocab Junkie – 800 Vocabulary Flashcards for Your iPad

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Screen Shot 2013-05-09 at 8.00.19 PM Vocab Junkie is an iPad app from Brainscape. I learned about Brainscape early this week on Larry Ferlazzo’s excellent blog. Vocab Junkie features more than 800 vocabulary flashcards. Like any flashcard application the cards present one word at a time. To get the definition tap the card to read it. After reading the definition and sample sentence rate your understanding of the word. Over time the app learns the words that you know better than others and shows you the words you don’t know more often than those you do know.

 

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OSnap! Grab This iPad App While It’s Free

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OSnap is an iPad app that I reviewed a couple of months ago. The app is available in a “lite” version and in a “pro” version. The pro version is currently available for free. It’s an excellent app for creating time-lapse and stop-motion videos.

The app is quite easy to use. To create a video with the OSnap app you simply need to start a project and take a series of still pictures using your iPad’s camera. Then adjust the number of frame per second to edit your video. If you want to, you can add a sound track to your video by selecting audio files that are stored on your iPad. You can go back and edit your videos by removing images and from the project at any time. Completed projects can be stored on your iPad, uploaded to YouTube, or shared via email.

Audubon Owls – Discover the Owls In Your Neighborhood

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Audubon Owls is an iPhone app (it will work on iPads too but it’s not optimized for them) that is small, multimedia encyclopedia of North American owls. Through the app you can learn about nineteen types of owls. The app provides maps of the range of each owl. To help you identify owls that you might hear in your part of North America, the app offers audio recordings of each owl’s calls. And as you might expect there are multiple pictures of each owl.

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One of the things that I think we often overlook with iPads in education is that they are mobile devices and our students should use them as such instead of just using them in the classroom. If you live in a rural area, have your students try to identify owls in the area by the sound of their calls. Let your students take their iPads or iPhones outside in the evening to play the call of owls to remind themselves of what they’re listening for.

Save $3 on Geography Drive for iPad

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One of my favorite geography apps for elementary and middle school students is Geography Drive. Unfortunately, the app normally costs $3.99 which puts it out of reach for a lot schools that would like to purchase it for every student. Right now the developer is having an end-of-school sale. During this sale the price of the app is dropped to $0.99. I don’t normally cover sales and promotions like this, but Geography Drive really is an excellent app and at $0.99 it’s a great deal.