iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

reading apps

Read Your Own PDFs and EPUBs in Google Play Books for iPad

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Screen Shot 2014-12-04 at 5.42.54 PM For the last 18 months Google has allowed you to upload your own PDFs and EPUB files to your personal Google Books account. Unfortunately, you could only access those uploaded files through a web browser or on the Google Books Android app. That has changed with the latest update to Google Play Books for iPad. The latest update to Google Play Books for iPad enables you to read your uploaded files through the app.

Other updates to the app include the option to categorize and sort books, double-tap to zoom, and a new material design to match that of other Google products like Google Drive.

Uploading PDFs and EPUBs to your Google Play account could be a good way to get things like public domain works found on Project Gutenberg from your desktop to your iPad.

H/T to The Next Web. 

Learn Vowel Sounds With These Clever Goats

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phonics_fun Clever Goats is an iPad app development company that has produced a handful of nice iPad apps designed to help students learn to read and write. Phonics Fun: Long and Short Vowel Sounds is one of the Clever Goats apps that I recently tried.

Phonics Fun: Long and Short Vowel Sounds asks students to trace letters, identify vowels within words, and then identify objects whose names contain short and long vowel sounds. A half-dozen activities is available for each vowel. Clear, narrated directions are provided to students as they work through the app. Feedback is provided to students at the completion of each activity screen.

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Phonics Fun: Long and Short Vowel Sounds is currently (April 28, 2014) available for free. The app usually costs $1.99.

Host iPad-based Book Discussions on Subtext

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Subtext is a great free iPad app that provides a place for teachers and students to have digital book discussions.


These are some of the many things that you can do with Subtext: using Subtext you can read ebooks, annotate ebooks, create quizzes about ebooks, and write blog posts about the ebooks you read. You can create private and public book discussion groups and build bookshelves for your groups.

To add books to your Subtext bookshelves you can pull from Google Books (many free ebooks are available that way), buy ebooks from Subtext (volume pricing is available), or upload your own titles (Greg Kulowiec has posted directions here). To annotate a section of a book just highlight it then choose what you want to do with it. The text that you highlight can be annotated with your messages, you can assign a quiz question to that text, or label that section as a literary element like “personification” or “foreshadowing.”