iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

reading

Teach Your Monster Read for iOS – Free Through the Weekend

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Teach Your Monster to Read is a great game environment in which students can develop the speed and accuracy with which they recognize letters, sounds, and words. For the rest of this week and through the weekend (March 21-26, 2017), the app is completely free.

The Teach Your Monster to Read environment contains eight levels (or islands as they’re called in the game) each containing four activities. Students play the game as a friendly monster avatar. On each island students can earn prizes for their monsters and customize the look of their monsters.

Country Mouse and City Mouse – Interactive iPad Story

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McGraw Hill has put the classic Country Mouse and City Mouse into an interactive format for iPads. The Country Mouse and City Mouse iPad app gives students the option of having the story read to them or to read the story to themselves. Each page in the story includes a simple animation. Students can make the mice in the story move around by touching them on their iPads.

This isn’t a novel app by any means, but it is a nice app if you’re looking to add some children’s stories to your students’ iPads.

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. 

News-O-Matic – Daily News for Kids in English and Spanish

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Screen Shot 2014-10-28 at 6.42.42 PM News-O-Matic is a service that offers daily news stories for elementary school students. Along with the news stories News-O-Matic provides videos, games, and quizzes to help students learn about the world. The latest update to the News-O-Matic iPad app introduced an option to quickly switch between an English and a Spanish version of the app.

News-O-Matic does a good job of offering students a number of options for learning about the topic of a chosen news article. When students choose articles from the News-O-Matic homescreen they are taken directly to that article where they can then read the article as is or choose to have it read aloud to them. A menu to the right of each article contains access to additional features like a summary of key facts, tools for highlighting sections of the article, and slideshows and videos related to the topic of the chosen article.

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News-O-Matic is a subscription service. The app is free to install and use for accessing some articles. A subscription is required in order to unlock all of the app’s features.

Morfo + Aurasma = Augmented Reality Book Trailers

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Screen-Shot-2014-06-26-at-6.05.58-PM Last week at the ACTEM conference I showed some folks possible uses for the Morfo 3D Faces app and the Aurasma iPad app.

Morfo 3D Faces is an iPad app that you can use to create a talking picture of person’s face. You can take a picture of a person or you can take a picture of a picture of a person (for example, taking a picture of a picture of a person in a book). Once you’ve captured the picture you can customize the face by altering the eyes, mouth, and nose to move as you talk. After customizing the picture you can record yourself talking.

Aurasma is a free app for iPads, iPhones, and  Android devices. Using Aurasma you can create augmented reality layers, Aurasma calls them “auras,” that pop-up when you scan objects with your phone or tablet. The layers that you create can include image or video files that are stored on your iPad.

Morfo + Aurasma = Augmented Reality Book Trailers.

Morfo files can be saved directly to your iPad as small video files. If you have students create short Morfos about characters from a book those files can be added to Aurasma auras. Students can create auras that appear when the cover a book is scanned with an iPad or Android device that has Aurasma installed on it. Make the Aurasma auras public and your students could develop a catalog of augmented reality book trailers for other students to enjoy while getting book recommendations.