iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

Poetry

Word Mover Helps Students Write Poems

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Screen Shot 2013-12-19 at 8.20.52 PM Word Mover is a free iPad app produced by Read Write Think. The app is designed to help students develop poems and short stories. When students open the Word Mover app they are shown a selection of words that they can drag onto a canvas to construct a poem or story. Word Mover provides students with eight canvas backgrounds on which they can construct their poems. If the word bank provided by Word Mover doesn’t offer enough words they can add their own words to the word bank.

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Word Mover could be a great app for students to use to as a story or poem starter. The app reminds me a bit of those refrigerator magnets that were popular for a while about ten years ago. You know, the ones that had individual words on them that you dragged around to create funny sentences. The same idea can be applied to Word Mover.

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.

The Poetry App – Discover Famous Poems and Poets

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Screen Shot 2013-04-05 at 1.42.18 PM The Josephine Hart Poetry App is a free iPad app that students can use to discover and read works of sixteen famous poets including Yeats, Byron, and Frost. Students can browse through the app to find a poet. When they find a poet students can click on that poet’s portrait to open a small biography and a selection of poems written by that poet. Students can read the poems and listen to narrations of the poems. Many of the poems are narrated by famous actors. Students can download the poems and audio recordings to use offline. Students can also organize poems into a collection of favorites in the Poetry App.

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