iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

world languages

HelloTalk – Learn a Language With the Help of Others

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hellotalkDisclosure: HelloTalk is an advertiser on one of my other blogs, FreeTech4Teachers.com

HelloTalk is a service designed to help students learn a new language. The service operates through free Android and iOS apps. On the HelloTalk apps you can find flashcards, text to speech tools to help you understand how words should be pronounced, speech to text tools to practice your pronunciations, and translation tools are included in the app. HelloTalk currently supports seventeen languages.

HelloTalk provides a social network component that allows users to connect with native speakers of the languages that they are trying to learn. The connection with native speakers is intended to help learners develop an understanding of a new language in a conversational setting. I was concerned about students under 18 being contacted by adults through the HelloTalk network so I asked the developer about measures taken to prevent this. Here’s what he said,

  • “anyone above 18 can’t search anyone below 18 (you can verify this by looking at HelloTalk account Settings/Who Can Find Me or Custom Search. Users under 18 can only search for users up to age 22. We deliberately set these rule to protect teenagers.”

Duolingo – Learn a New Language on Your iPad

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Screen Shot 2012-11-21 at 8.54.36 AM Duolingo is a free service that can help you learn Spanish, French, German, Italian, English, and Portuguese. Recently, Duolingo released a free iPad app to complement the free Android and iPhone apps that they offer. The apps and the website provide a variety of translation activities to help learn to you read, listen to, and translate words and phrases. To learn a new language on Duolingo you read, listen to, and translate words and phrases. For example if I want to learn Spanish I’ll be shown Spanish words with translations. I can can hear the words pronounced too. Then to practice I type and or speak translations. The activities start out with simple words and phrases. As I become more proficient, Duolingo gives me more challenging phrases. To help me track my progress Duolingo awards me point and virtual badges.

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The Phrasal Verbs Machine – A Nice App for ELL Students

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Screen Shot 2013-02-25 at 10.44.21 AM One of the true challenges for English language learners is understanding the meanings of phrasal verbs. The Phrasal Verbs Machine, developed by Cambridge University, is a free iPad app that aims to help ELL students learn the meanings of phrasal verbs. The Phrasal Verbs Machine provides students with short animations that illustrate the meanings of many common phrasal verbs. There is a written definition below each animation. Students can view the animations and definitions as many times as they like before trying their hands at the practice identification exercises. The Phrasal Verbs Machine provides definition translations in Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, and Portuguese.

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70+ iPad Apps Written in French for Students

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Sylvia Duckworth is a French teacher who has started a new blog about iPad and iPhone apps that are available in French. Slyvia reviewing apps and making suggestions for apps that students can use in French. Some of the apps are for learning French while others are for completing activities completely in French. You may notice that some of the apps you have used in English are also available in French. As a starting place take a look at this list of more than 70 apps Sylvia suggests.

Use StudyBlue’s iPad App to Create and Share Study Materials

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Screen Shot 2013-01-25 at 8.44.42 AM StudyBlue is a service for creating and sharing flashcard sets. The free StudyBlue iPad app allows you to create flashcards in three ways. You can enter text, take a picture, or speak into the app. The app can be used by students to review their flashcards in a quiz style or by just flipping through their flashcards. And students can use the app to search for public sets of flashcards in the StudyBlue gallery.

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The first time a student signs-into the app he or she is given the opportunity to enter a school name. Entering a school name will give the student the option to find flashcards created by other students in the same school.

StudyBlue will track usage statistics to help students identify which flashcards a student has mastered and which ones they need to spend more time on. Students can study their flashcards without an Internet connection, but they do need an Internet connection in order to create new flashcards and search for other users’ flashcards.

Creating flashcards with audio recordings could be very useful for students that are trying to learn a new language. A teacher could create flashcards in which they speak a word with proper pronunciation on one side and the spelling of the word on the other. After creating a set of flashcards share it with your students. Or you could reverse the process and have students create the flashcards, share with you, and then assess them on their recorded pronunciations.

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Click here to download the StudyBlue iPad app.