iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

research

Try RefME’s iPad App for Quickly Organizing Reference Lists

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refme RefME is a service designed to help students create citations and organize bibliographies. The free RefME iPad app enables students to scan the barcode on a book, periodical, CD cases, and many other media cases to have a citation formatted for that item. RefME provides more than 6,500 citation and bibliography formats for students to use.

I tried RefME’s free iPad app this afternoon and found it easy to use. To get started open the app and create a RefME account. After creating an account create your first project in RefME. A project is essentially a folder for the citations that you are going to create for a paper. Select your project then add a reference by scanning the barcode on a book or other media. When you have finished scanning all of your references (you can also add references manually) you can export your list of citations to Evernote, email the list to yourself, or create a Word document from the RefME website.

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RefME could be a fantastic tool for students to use as they develop research projects. The app could be particularly handy when students are using books or periodicals that the cannot take out of the library.

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.

Professor Garfield Teaches Students to Recognize Facts and Opinions

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Screen Shot 2014-04-18 at 7.58.49 PMProfessor Garfield Fact or Opinion is a free iPad app designed to help students learn to recognize the difference between facts and opinions. The app features a comic book story in which students will read examples of facts and opinions accompanied by explanations of what makes them facts or opinions. After reading the comic students play a series of games in which they practice recognizing the fact that is mixed-in with opinion statements.

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Determining fact from opinion is the first step that I review with students before they embark on a research project. The sooner students learn to recognize the difference between fact and opinion, the better. Professor Garfield Fact or Opinion could be a great app to help elementary school and middle school students learn to differentiate facts from opinions.

A Small Collection of Studies of iPad Use in Education

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brain-78440_640 This week I got the itch to go beyond anecdotal stories about iPads in the classroom and look for some more substantial research and writing on the topic. Below are some of the reports that I’ve been reading through this week.

The Department of Education and Early Childhood Development for Victoria, Australia iPads for Learning – In Their Hands field trial studied the use of iPads in nine schools. One of the observations to note here is that greater success was reported at primary and special schools than in secondary schools.

The iPad as a Tool for Education is a study based on iPad use at Longfield Academy, Kent, England . There is strong emphasis on interpreting the data generated by surveying students and faculty. It’s interesting to note the differences in how students perceived the impact of iPad use on their achievement and how teachers perceived the impact of students use of iPads on student achievement.

Reading With iPads – The Difference Makes a Difference studied the impact on the reading comprehension, knowledge of content, and analysis skills of boys aged 11 to 13 who read using iPads.

Promoting Student Engagement by Integrating New Technology into Tertiary Education: The Role of the iPad studied the use of iPads by teachers and students in distance learning and in-person learning environments. The report includes some quotes from students who seem to have benefitted from the use of iPads. I would like to see the rest of the survey data that was used in the formation of this report.

The Impact of the iPad and iPhone on Education was published in 2010 and is speculative in nature as the students surveyed had not yet been given iPads. The study was gauging student and instructor interest in iPads and potential uses. I would like to see the follow up report if there is one available.