iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

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Skaffl – An iPad App for Distributing, Collecting, and Grading Assignments

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Screen Shot 2014-12-03 at 12.39.44 PM Skaffl is a free iPad app designed to help you distribute, collect, and grade assignments. In the app you can create classrooms that your students join through a class code. Once your classroom is created you can distribute assignments and hand-outs to your students. Assignments can be created in the app or you can attach items created outside of the Skafll app. Your students can submit work through the app. You can grade your students’ assignments directly within the app. For assignments that aren’t going to be graded (a rough draft of an essay, for example) can annotated by you to provide students with feedback.

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Skaffl could be a good solution for teachers who want a simple way to distribute and collect assignments without wading through a myriad of extra features that they won’t use.

The Most Frequently Used Apps On My iPad

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ipad-254337_640 Over the weekend on FreeTech4Teachers.com I shared a list of my most frequently used desktop apps. That post was fairly popular so I think that a similar post about iPad apps is in order. These are the apps that see the most daily use on my iPad.

Evernote
When I am reading a blog post that I want to save for later, I share it to my Evernote account. I also use Evernote to save Skitch images. Occasionally, I use Evernote to share items from my iPad’s camera roll.

Skitch
Skitch is the tool that I use on my iPad when I want to create an annotated screenshot. I can use Skitch to draw on and label a screenshot to aid my explanation of how an application works. I can also use Skitch to blur or enhance a part of a picture that I’ve taken with my iPad. And if I just want to sketch out diagram and share it, Skitch for iPad lets me do that too.

Penultimate
Even though I can type relatively quickly with my poor technique, I still prefer to handwrite a lot my notes. For that reason, Penultimate is the app that I use to taking notes on my iPad. Penultimate provides a place for you to hand-write notes on your iPad. The app allows you to create multiple notebooks with multiple pages in each. You can change the color and size of the pen strokes that are created when you write in your notebooks. Each page in your notebook can include pictures that you have stored on your iPad or pictures that you take through the Penultimate app. The app provides the option to change the look of the virtual paper on which you write. You can copy and paste content from one page to another and from one notebook to another.

Apps Gone Free
I check this app at 12pm Eastern Time for new apps that are free for a limited time. Some of the apps are only free to download that day while others may remain free for a week or longer.

Google Drive
I don’t do much editing of Google Documents through my iPad because I find it much faster to do that on a Chromebook or laptop, but I do use Drive for reviewing Documents that have been shared with me. I also use Drive for storing videos that I have created on my iPad.

What about RSS subscriptions?
I have Feedly and Flipboard installed on my iPad. I use both to read the latest posts from my favorite blogs. That said, because of the workflow that I have set-up for myself, I don’t do a lot of reading on my iPad. Most of my reading of RSS subscriptions happens on my laptop where I can have my feeds in one browser tab and I can write my notes about what I’m reading in another tab. When I’m not reading at my desk, I tend to browse feeds on my phone which is an Android phone that has Feedly installed on it.

A Video Guide to Using the Google Drive iPad App

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Google_Drive_Logo_lrg-580x461Last Friday I was asked if I could share instructions for teachers and students using the latest version of the Google Drive for iPad app. I’m in the process of organizing all of my screenshots into a PDF. In the meantime, I have the following video overview of how to use the basic features of Google Drive iPad. At the end of the video I offer a tip about using multiple sign-in on shared iPads.