iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

literacy

Teach Your Monster Read for iOS – Free Through the Weekend

by

Teach Your Monster to Read is a great game environment in which students can develop the speed and accuracy with which they recognize letters, sounds, and words. For the rest of this week and through the weekend (March 21-26, 2017), the app is completely free.

The Teach Your Monster to Read environment contains eight levels (or islands as they’re called in the game) each containing four activities. Students play the game as a friendly monster avatar. On each island students can earn prizes for their monsters and customize the look of their monsters.

Teach Your Monster to Read On Your iPad

by

Screen Shot 2014-10-10 at 8.35.36 AM Teach Your Monster to Read is a fun game designed to help students improve the speed and accuracy with which they recognize letters, sounds, and words. Teach Your Monster to Read originally launched as a free web service (it is still available online). Recently, I learned from David Kapuler that Teach Your Monster to Read is now available as an iPad app too.

In Teach Your Monster to Read students play the roles of friendly monsters in a make-believe world. As they move through the game they have to complete short activities based on various letters, sounds, and words. As they move through the game, students can earn prizes for their monsters and customize their monsters’ appearances.

Teach Your Monster to Read is an expensive app at $4.99. If you’re not sure if it is what your students need, try the online demos first.

Quickly Organize Leveled Reading Lists With Book Wizard Mobile

by

Screen Shot 2014-09-15 at 12.26.54 PM Book Wizard is a Scholastic service that allows you to create and organize book lists according to reading levels and students’ interests. Book Wizard Mobile is a free iPad and iPhone app that you can use to scan a book’s barcode to quickly discover its lexile measurement, grade level equivalent, and guided reading level. Within the app you can create book lists and edit the existing book lists that you have created in your Scholastic.com teacher profile.

Screen Shot 2014-09-15 at 12.24.53 PM

Lists that you create on Book Wizard Mobile can be shared with others through a variety of channels including email, Pinterest, and Twitter.

Book Wizard Mobile is also available as an Android app.

Literacy Leveler – Quickly Determine a Book’s Reading Level

by

Screen Shot 2014-03-03 at 11.03.28 AM Literacy Leveler is a an iOS app (iPhone and iPad versions available) that allows you scan a book’s ISBN barcode and discover the reading level of the content of that book. Literacy Leveler supports Lexile®, DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment®), and Guided Reading leveling systems. If you don’t have a book’s ISBN barcode available, you can search for books by title or author. After discovering the reading level of a book’s content you can add it to a library in Literacy Leveler. Literacy Leveler’s database is focused on books that are appropriate for elementary school and middle school students.

screen480x480

If you install the iPad version of Literacy Leveler you will be prompted to install a second app to support the scanner.

Read and Create Your Own Stories With the Collins Big Cat iPad Apps

by

Screen Shot 2013-03-17 at 9.00.51 PM The Collins Big Cat iPad apps are part short story and part story creation tool. Each of these free apps, produced by Harper Collins, contains a short story that students can read to themselves or have narrated to them. The stories contain interactive elements that students can move around on each page of the stories.

After reading and or listening to the story in the app students can create their own stories using settings and characters that match the theme of the story they just read. On each page students can select a background, drag design features into the background, drag characters into the story, add text, and record their own narrations for their stories.

The Collins Big app that I tried was It Was a Cold, Dark Night. In the story I followed a hedgehog as he tried to find a warm place to sleep. The story contained a quiz designed to check my understanding. When I created my own short story the elements that I had to work with matched the tone and theme of It Was a Cold, Dark Night.

Photo-3_17_13,-8.59.18-PM-2

The Collins Big Cat apps recently won the BETT 2013 award for Primary Digital Content and I can see why. Children will enjoy reading the stories and creating stories in all eight of the free apps.