iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

ipads in education

Try Grammar Pop for iPad for Grammar Lessons

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Screen Shot 2013-09-05 at 10.56.34 AM Grammar Pop is a nice app from the producers of the popular Grammar Girl series. The app offers twenty-eight levels of difficulty. At each level players have to identify a part of speech and then identify the words in a sentence that match the chosen part of speech. For example, if I select “noun” I then have to identify all of the nouns in the sentences that are shown to me. Players earn points for correct answers and they lose points for incorrect answers. The “pop” part of the Grammar Pop title comes from the action of “popping” word bubbles when you correctly identify parts of speech.

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Grammar Pop isn’t the fanciest app that you’ll find in the App Store, but it does offer a nice means of practicing identifying parts of speech. The app is currently priced at $1.99. That cost is reduced through Apple’s volume purchasing program.

Shake Your iPad to Generate Story Prompts

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Screen Shot 2013-08-25 at 9.31.35 AMShake-a-Phrase is a fun iPad app for elementary school and middle school students to use to start stories and practice recognizing parts of speech. Shake-a-Phrase has three basic modes; shake it, story starter, and quiz mode. Each mode has five themes; animals, monsters, fairytales, sports, and random. In “shake it” mode students shake their iPads to have complete, but random sentences appear on their screens. The “story starter” mode presents students with a new random story prompt each time they shake their iPads. In both of these modes students can favorite sentences and prompts to refer to later. Shake-a-Phrase’s quiz mode presents students with random sentences in which they have to identify nouns, adjectives, verbs, conjunctions, and prepositions. Evernote Camera Roll 20130825 065034 Students will enjoy using Shake-a-Phrase, in part, because of the physical act of shaking their iPads to start a story. They’ll also enjoy it because of the fun sentences that are generated by the app. If you only have one iPad in your classroom, consider using Shake-a-Phrase as a story prompt generator. Each you use it you could have a different student take a turn shaking the iPad. Just make sure you have a good case on that iPad first. Evernote Camera Roll 20130825 065039 Shake-a-Phrase is currently priced at $1.99 USD.

5 Free iPad Apps Students Can Use for Taking Notes

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school-36784_150 One of the things that I love about the start of the new school year is that so many students have goals for making “this year the year they…” For many students that blank is filled in with “stay organized” or “take better notes.” If your students are going to be using iPads in your classroom this year, here are five free iPad apps they can try for taking notes and keeping those notes organized.

inClass is a fantastic free iPad app that students can use to take and keep track of the notes they record in all of their courses. inClass allows students to organize notebooks for each of their courses. Within each notebook students can include typed notes, audio notes, video notes, and pictures. The ability to store those four types of notes makes inClass a great app for students to use in a science lab where they might want to have a little video clip of an experiment along with their own typed notes about the lab experiment.

Evernote is the Swiss Army knife of iPad apps. Students can use Evernote for a little bit of everything from bookmarking websites to dictating notes to themselves. The app will automatically sync with students online Evernote accounts so that they can access my notes, bookmarks, and saved files from any computer or device that is connected to the web.

Penultimate provides a place for you to hand-write notes on your iPad. The app allows you to create multiple notebooks with multiple pages in each. You can change the color and size of the pen strokes that are created when you write in your notebooks. Each page in your notebook can include pictures that you have stored on your iPad or pictures that you take through the Penultimate app. The app provides the option to change the look of the virtual paper on which you write. You can copy and paste content from one page to another and from one notebook to another.

Fetchnotes is a service for creating and organizing notes for yourself. Organizing your notes on Fetchnotes is quite simple. When you write a note, just use a hashtag to label your note. Then whenever you want to search for a note just enter a hashtag. For example, if I was a student taking notes in a history course I might use the hashtag “#revolution” for all notes related to revolutions. Then I could go back and read all of my notes about revolution by just searching for that hashtag. Fetchnotes lets you create groups of people with whom you share notes. When you want to share a note with someone else in your group just add @ before that person’s name to have the task appear on your list and his or her list. In addition to being available through the free iPad app, Fetchnotes can be used in your web browser. Fetchnotes also offers a free Android app.

Last but not least is Google Drive for iPad. While not nearly as robust as the browser-based version of Google Drive, Google Drive for iPad can be used by students to create notes documents. If your school is using Google Apps for Education, your students are probably already familiar with how to use Google Drive. Of course, their notes will sync to their Google Drive accounts so that they can access their notes through any Internet-connected device. Click here for a short (13 page PDF) guide to using Google Drive for iPad.

27 Good iPad Apps for Elementary School Students

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schoolbus-81717_640 As the new school year starts many teachers and their students will have iPads at their disposal for the first time. If you’re one of those teachers getting iPads in your classroom for the first time, you’re probably on the hunt for apps for your students. The short document embedded below provides a sample of some of the apps that you might want your students to use.

The document is hosted on Box.com. You should be able to download it from here. If you cannot see the document, click here for a direct link to it.

Visual Poetry – Create Word Clouds On Your iPad

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Screen Shot 2013-08-16 at 8.25.04 PM Visual Poetry is a nice iPad app for creating custom word clouds. The app’s name implies that it only works for poetry, but it will work with any text that you write. Visual Poetry allows you to choose from a menu of word cloud shapes. If the shapes in the menu aren’t quite what you’re after, you can draw your own shapes to use for your word clouds. Visual Poetry provides a wide selection of font styles, font colors, and background colors. By default Visual Poetry makes the most common words the largest, but you can make other words the featured words by simply typing them into your word clouds.

Word clouds can be useful in helping students identify the words that are emphasized in a written article or a speech. After creating their word clouds ask your students to think about why the author or speaker used some words so frequently. Word clouds can also be used to help students see which words that they have frequently used in their own works. Have your students create word clouds of their work during the revision process of writing a story or essay. The word cloud will quickly show students which words they have used a lot. Then ask them to think about synonyms for the words that they have used most often in their writing.

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Visual Poetry is currently priced at $1.99 USD.