iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

nature

Disneynature Explore – An Augmented Reality App for Learning About Nature

by

disney Disneynature Explore is a free iPad app designed to help children learn about bear, butterflies, lions, chimpanzees, and sea turtles. The activities for learning about each animal include augmented reality components. Students can use their iPads to take pictures to put animals into settings that they photograph.

The app encourages students to go on nature walks with their parents. On the nature walks students can take pictures and record observations in their digital field journals.

My favorite part of the Disneynature Explore app is the interactive augmented reality aspect of the brown bear lesson. The lesson starts with a prompt for students to growl like a bear. After growling like a bear students swipe at salmon swimming up a river.

Fotopedia Wild Friends – A Beautiful iPad App About Animals

by

Screen Shot 2013-11-29 at 7.49.04 PM Fotopedia Wild Friends is a beautiful iPad app that takes students on a photographic tour of Europe and beyond. The app features more than 2,400 images of animals. The images can be viewed on their own or as parts of slideshows. At any time students can tap an image to open a short passage of text about the animal(s) they’re viewing.

Evernote Camera Roll 20131129 194950

Pair Fotopedia Wild Friends with the World Wildlife Fund’s Together app and your students will get lost exploring nature on their iPads. (Both apps are free).

H/T to Jen Deyenberg for the Fotopedia app. 

Project Noah – Share Stories of Nature In Your Neighborhood

by

Screen Shot 2013-05-07 at 9.12.25 AMProject Noah is a globally collaborative project to which anyone can contribute. On Project Noah you can share pictures and stories of the plants and the animals that you observe in your neighborhood. Project Noah has a section titled Missions in which you can find projects that you can contribute to. The Missions ask people to make contributions of images and observations about a specific animal, plant, or region. Check out the squirrel mission to get started. Project Noah offers iOS and Android apps that you can use to record and share your observations on the go.

Screen Shot 2012-11-07 at 10.46.24 PM

Project Noah has an Education section in which teachers can register their classrooms. Once registered teachers can assign Missions to their students and track their students’ observations.

Share Observations of Nature With iNaturalist

by

Screen Shot 2013-05-06 at 6.35.54 PMiNaturalist is a community website for sharing pictures and observations of plants and animals. To enable easy sharing of observations, iNaturalist offers a free iOS app. Using the app you can take a picture, geo-locate it, write your observations, and upload to the iNaturalist community. If your observation is incomplete, for example if you’re not sure of a scientific name, you can ask the community to add comments to improve the recording of your observation.


If you don’t want to join the iNaturalist community, you can simply explore members’ observations through the iNaturalist Google Map.

A New Rhino Story Added to the Beautiful WWF Together App

by

wwf WWF Together is a beautiful free app from the World Wildlife Fund. In fact, I think it is the most visually beautiful app I tried in January. WWF Together features interactive stories about endangered animals around the world. Each of the interactive stories includes beautiful images and videos, facts about the animals and their habitats, and the threats to each of the animals. This week a story about rhinos was added to the app. If you haven’t tried the WWF Together app yet, download it today and give it a try. I think that it could be a nice way to help students learn about the challenges facing wildlife around the world.

Photo-1_22_13,-10.36.04-PM-4