iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

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5 Ways Teachers Can Use their iPads Professionally

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chaos-391652_640This is a guest post from Jennifer Carey (@TeacherJenCarey) and EdTechTeacher, an advertiser on this site.

iPads are powerful tools for teachers in the classroom. In addition to being robust, mobile creation devices for students, they help you to stay organized, be on top of your classes, create content and lessons, focus on continued learning, and build your PLN. Here are five ways to turn your iPad into a robust, education machine!

Organize Yourself

You can easily sync your Outlook or Google Calendar to your iPad by going to iPad Settings → Mail, Contacts, & Calendar → Add Account. This allows you to add multiple work, personal, and/or shared calendars to the calendar on your iPad, giving you mobile access to all of your appointments (personal and professional) on a single calendar. You will also be able to make changes on the go, and with cloud based platforms, you won’t have to remember to sync your device to your computer as all changes are updated automatically.

By using the Reminder app, you can schedule notifications weeks, months, even years in advance! One of my favorite features of Reminder is that in addition to alarms based on date/time, you can set a reminder notification based on location (don’t forget to buy milk at the grocery store or to take your gym shoes as you leave your house in the morning). If you want to conquer more robust tasks, look at investing in one of the popular To-Do List apps such as Wunderlist, Things, or Trello.

Organize your Class

Even if your school does not have a formal LMS, there are numerous free tools that allow you to organize a class calendar, have students check and submit homework assignments, share content and materials, keep attendance, track students, and even send robust reports to advisors, administrators, and/or parents. Some of the most popular and comprehensive LMS’s available include Schoology, Teacherkit, and Edmodo. While Google Classroom does not yet have a formal app, you can still access it using your iPad’s browser (while Safari is the default, I find that it works best using the Chrome iOS browser).

Create Class Content

iPads are not just mobile, creation devices for students; they are a powerful tool in the hands of a teacher. You can easily build both traditional and creative lessons for your classes. Keynote, Google Slides, PowerPoint (creation abilities require a subscription to Office 365), and/or Prezi allow you to create class presentations rich with text, images, charts, graphs, and video!

Additionally, you can easily make flipped content using tools such as iMovie, Notability, Explain Everything, or Educreations. These apps allow you to share content to cloud services such as YouTube, Vimeo, or Google Drive. From there, you can post to your course website or LMS (using one of the tools listed above) or share via Google Drive.

Manage your Professional Development

Great educators are lifelong learners. It’s easy to keep up with your own learning and professional development goals using iPad. With eReader Apps such as Kindle, iBooks, Nook, or Overdrive, you can access a myriad of electronic texts on your mobile device. Even better, you are not limited to a single platform or provider. Your local library may even offer eBooks on loan! In addition to texts, be sure to check out the variety of content offered via Podcasts and iTunes U. You can readily access content related to educational theory and topics, or your own areas of interest (History, Math, Politics, etc). Also, be sure to check out the variety of resources published via iPad apps such as Ted or PBS.

Manage your PLN

Keeping up with your Personal Learning Network (PLN) can feel daunting. However, iPad allows you to access your PLN using a variety of tools. With stand alone apps like Twitter, Diigo, Facebook, Feedly, or Pocket, you can easily share and consume resources on the fly. However, I also like to use an app called Flipboard that enables me to see my Social Media, Blog posts, and News Resources in a magazine-like interface. You can learn more about navigating your PLN in this article on Edutopia.

iPads are powerful tools in the educational environment, not just for students, but also for teachers. Harnessing the power of iPad can help you to stay more organized, meet your classroom goals, and manage your own professional development on a single, portable device.

To learn more about these ideas, and more, check out the November 12-14 EdTechTeacher iPad Summit in Boston where I will be a Featured Speaker.

MyMind – Take Notes While Viewing Websites on Your iPad

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Screen Shot 2014-09-24 at 12.36.47 PM MyMind is a good iPad app for creating and organizing text, audio, and visual notes. MyMind allows you to type notes or write them free-hand. To each note you can add pictures, audio files, and video files. Your audio files can be recorded within the app. All notes are organized into notebooks that your create and name.

None of the features mentioned above are terribly unique on their own as other apps do the same things. What makes MyMind different from many of those other notebook apps is that you can view websites while taking notes in the app. Tapping the “research” button on the right-hand side of any note will create a split screen in the app. The right-hand screen becomes a web browser. You can take notes about a website you’re viewing within MyMind. You can even record an audio note while using the web browser in MyMind. That could be a great feature for students to use when they’re conducting research. They can quickly dictate a note about how they might use information from a particular website in their research reports.

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MyMind is currently priced at $4.99.

Who Has What? – An App for Keeping Track of Borrowed Materials

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Screen Shot 2014-02-05 at 5.30.39 PM I can’t tell you how many books, CDs (remember when we used those to listen to music?), and DVDs I’ve lent out and never seen again. Who Has What? 2 is an iPad app that could help me keep track of those things from now on. Who Has What? 2 allows me to create an inventory of the things that I lend by taking pictures of them or scanning their barcodes (the barcode function didn’t work as well as I hoped when I tested it). Once an item is in my inventory when I lend it out I just select it on my iPad, enter the name and or email address of the person I’m lending it to, and set a due date for that item. From the iPad I can send due date reminders to the people that I’ve lent my items to.

Who Has What? 2 doesn’t appear to have an efficient way to upload a large inventory list so it’s not a replacement for a school library catalog system. That said, Who Has What? 2 could be a great app to use for keeping track of items that you lend from your classroom.

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Who Has What? 2 is currently priced at $0.99

A Simple Weighted Pro-Con Chart Tool for Your iPad

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proconT-Charts Pros and Cons is a free iPad app designed to help you organize your thoughts about a question or dilemma. This simple app provides a clean layout in which you can write your pros and cons lists. Each thing that you write on your lists can be given a different weight. For example, if you’re trying to decide if you should study or go to a party you can give extra weight to “will probably do better on the test if I study” in your chart. Within T-Charts Pros and Cons you can create and manage multiple lists. All of your lists can be emailed to friends for their input and feedback.

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Beyond weighing personal decisions T-Charts Pros and Cons could be used by students to keep track of points made in a classroom debate or to help them decide upon a position to take in writing an opinion paper.

Todoist – Create and Manage To-Do Lists on iPads and More

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Screen Shot 2013-07-25 at 10.04.15 PM Todoist is an easy-to-use task management service that I first tried on the web a couple of years ago. When I tried it then I was impressed by its clean design and intuitive user interface. Todoist is also available to use as an iPad app (Android and Windows apps are available too). The free iPad app seamlessly syncs with your Todoist online account.

When you create projects and assignments in Todoist by default they are arranged chronologically. You can reordering them by simply selecting an moving them up or down. The free version of Todoist provides twelve color coded labels that you can apply to tasks and projects.

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