iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

science

Marco Polo Weather – A Fun App About Weather

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Screen Shot 2014-10-03 at 9.09.44 AM Marco Polo Weather is a new iPad app designed to help young students learn about weather. The app features cute little animated characters that children can move and dress. Children can also alter the setting surrounding their characters. Changing the setting includes changing the weather from sunny to cloudy, from warm to cold, from calm to windy, and from raining to snowing. Of course, children can combine those variables to develop almost any type of weather condition. As children change the weather they will hear a narrator explain the weather. For example, when children select rain the narrator explains what rain is.

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Marco Polo Weather doesn’t provide the most scientific or thorough explanations that you’ll find, but they are adequate for the audience that app is intended to educate. The app is free, but it does require an in-app purchase to unlock all of the available weather variables.

Leafsnap – An App for Identifying Plants

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Screen Shot 2014-09-23 at 9.12.16 AM I often encourage teachers to think of ways to use iPads and other mobile devices for outdoor learning activities. LeafSnap is a free iPad app designed by Columbia University, Smithsonian, and the University of Maryland for the purpose of helping people identify plants by taking pictures of them on their iPads.

With LeafSnap installed on your iPad or iPhone you can take a picture of a leaf, upload it to the app, and then the app’s visual recognition technology will help you identify the name of the plant. It doesn’t work for all leaves and you do need to isolate the leaf be before you take a picture of it. In other words, you can’t just snap a picture of a big tree and ask LeafSnap to identify it.

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If taking pictures of leaves is not a practical option for you and your students, LeafSnap still has valuable content for you. LeafSnap offers a large gallery of pictures of leaves. The gallery is organized alphabetically. Tap on any picture in the gallery to see more pictures of the same leaf, descriptions of the tree that it grows on, and where those trees grow.

Disneynature Explore – An Augmented Reality App for Learning About Nature

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disney Disneynature Explore is a free iPad app designed to help children learn about bear, butterflies, lions, chimpanzees, and sea turtles. The activities for learning about each animal include augmented reality components. Students can use their iPads to take pictures to put animals into settings that they photograph.

The app encourages students to go on nature walks with their parents. On the nature walks students can take pictures and record observations in their digital field journals.

My favorite part of the Disneynature Explore app is the interactive augmented reality aspect of the brown bear lesson. The lesson starts with a prompt for students to growl like a bear. After growling like a bear students swipe at salmon swimming up a river.

My Incredible Body Teaches Kids How the Human Body Works

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Screen Shot 2014-07-07 at 7.11.34 PM My Incredible Body is an iPad app (currently free) designed to help students learn how the human body works. The app features eight sections. Those sections are circulation, muscles, senses (vision, smell, hearing, touch), kidneys & urine, skeleton, respiration, digestion, and brain & nerves. Each section of the app contains short animated videos that explain the functions of each system and how it works.

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Students can work through My Incredible Body in any order they choose. The content of the videos that I watched in My Incredible Body are appropriate for middle school students, but would be too basic for high school students.

84 iPad Apps to Share With K-12 Teachers and Students

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ipad-254337_640Each day this week I shared sets of 21 iPad apps for various grade levels. To wrap-up the week I have put all four of those sets in this post. Please feel free to make copies of these slidedecks and share them with your colleagues. To make copies click the gear icon at the bottom of the slides then open the editor and choose “make copy” from the file menu. (You will need to be signed into a Google Account to make the copy).