iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

Music Apps

Firo – An Excellent App for Creating Music Tracks

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firo Firo is an app, currently free, for creating music on your iPad. I’ve tried a lot of music creation apps over the years, Firo is as good or better than all of them.

Firo is intended to be a full-fledged music creation tool. It doesn’t contain tutorials or lessons on making music, that is up to you. What Firo provides is twelve instruments that you can play on the app’s digital keyboard. The keyboard includes keys for one-touch creation of chords to lay down as context for the rest of the song that you’re creating. You can create and record loops to as harmony to the melody you’re creating. Or you can reverse that and play your melody on a loop while working on your song’s harmony.

Completed Firo projects can be saved on your iPad, shared on SoundCloud, opened in iMovie, or saved as MIDI files to use in other projects.

Firo could be an excellent app for use in music classes in which students are learning about composition. The app could also be helpful in developing music for use in video projects.

Chromatik – Have Fun Learning New Music

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Screen Shot 2014-02-24 at 3.51.52 PM Chromatik is a free iPad app that makes it fun to learn and practice new music. Chromatik offers recordings of popular songs along with the sheet music to play them on more than a dozen instruments. The recordings and sheet music are yours to use for seven days. Chromatik includes an option to make a recording of your playing of a song. You can share highlights of your recordings with others through email, Facebook, and Twitter.

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Chromatik does require you to have an email address and some of the songs may not be appropriate for students younger than high school (the songs are all hits you’ve heard on the radio, but that doesn’t mean you want 12 year olds playing them in your school). A classroom-friendly of Chromatik is offered to schools. That version requires a $3.99 in-app purchase to unlock all of the features.

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Both versions of Chromatik offer tools for annotating the sheet music that you access through the app.

Vjay for iPad Lets Anyone Create Music Loops

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Screen Shot 2013-06-29 at 5.11.59 PM Vjay is an iPad app for creating short music video loops. The app provides a collection of free music video clips that you can blend together to create a new music video loop. You can adjust the tempo and volume of each clip individually as you blend them together into your new creation. Your finished product can be saved on your iPad, sent to YouTube, and shared on Facebook.

Vjay could be a good app for students to use when they need to create bumper music or theme music for a podcast or video project.

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Update: When I wrote this post the app was free. This afternoon it appears to be priced at $9.99. As a free app, it’s great. I don’t think I would pay $9.99 for it though.

Learn to Play the Piano With Your iPad

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Screen Shot 2013-01-10 at 12.09.46 PM JoyTunes is a company that has built two neat iPad apps to help students learn to play the piano and the recorder. The apps are games that require you to play the correct notes on your recorder or piano. When you play the correct notes you can move forward in the game. The notes that are you play are picked up by the microphone on your iPad. The piano version of the app is available here. The recorder version of the app is available here.

Playing the Joy Tunes games could be a good break from traditional music practice activities. I wouldn’t replace practicing scales and other time-tested methods with playing these games, but playing the games could throw a new fun element into practice.