iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

writing

Book Creator for iPad is 50% Off This Week

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book_creatorThe popular Book Creator iPad app turns five years old this week. To celebrate its birthday the developers are discounting the app by 50% all week (September 19 – September 25, 2016). The discount even applies to those using the volume purchasing program.

Book Creator allows anyone to create their own books using images, text, videos, drawings, and audio recordings. You can arrange your book in three different formats; portrait, square, or landscape. Each page in your book can include pictures and videos from your iPad’s camera roll and or from your iTunes library. In addition to the pictures and videos you can include as much as text as you can fit on each page. In fact, if you just want to have text on a page you can do that. If you would like to narrate your book you can tap the record button to add your voice to each page of your book. Every page in your book can have a custom color scheme.

For those who want to make multimedia comics, Book Creator is a great choice. Comic templates including comic fonts, speech bubbles, and characters can be used in Book Creator books.

Book Creator allows you to export your books to ePub format. The exported file can be opened and read in the Chrome web browser using the free Readium browser extension. This is a great option as it allows a parent who doesn’t have an iPad at home to view his or her child’s work at home.

I’m sure this post reads like an advertisement for Book Creator. I don’t have any business affiliation with the Book Creator developers. I shared the news just because I think it’s a great app and it’s available at a great price right now. 

Inspire Creative Writing With the Scribeasy App

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scribeasy icon One of the challenges of teaching creative writing can be just getting students to start a story. That’s when apps like Scribeasy can be quite helpful as they provide students with visual prompts that can inspire the start of a story.

Scribeasy is a free iPad app that offers a fun environment in which students can write short stories. Students create stories on Scribeasy by first selecting a background image then dragging and dropping additional pictures onto their chosen background images. When students select objects to add to their backgrounds, a narrator reads the name of the object aloud. Students can move and resize all images to create a visual story in Scribeasy.

scribeasy writing

Once the visuals are in place on Scribeasy students then write a story about the scenes they’ve created. The next step is where Scribeasy shines. Scribeasy gives students a list of suggested words to use in their stories. The writing process is a timed activity. Students can choose to write for a short, medium, or large amount of time (they can extend the time if needed). Completed stories are saved in the app. Students can also save their stories to the camera roll on their iPads.

Part of this post originally appeared on my other blog, FreeTech4Teachers.com

Create Comics in the Latest Version of Book Creator for iPad

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book_creator The popular Book Creator iPad app received a great update this week. The full version of Book Creator now includes tools for creating comics. The comic creation tools include a large selection of layouts, speech bubbles, drawing tools, stamps, and stickers. You can even include your own pictures in the comics that you create in Book creator. Watch the video embedded below to learn more about the comics creation option in Book Creator.

Book Creator allows you to export your books to ePub format. The exported file can be opened and read in the Chrome web browser using the free Readium browser extension. This is a great option as it allows a parent who doesn’t have an iPad at home to view his or her child’s work at home.

My Story – Create Multimedia Books on Your iPad

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Screen Shot 2014-09-08 at 12.50.02 PMMy Story is a nice iPad app for creating multimedia story books on your iPad. There are other apps that offer the same functions as My Story, but the appeal of My Story is that kids don’t have to create accounts and multiple students can use the same installation of the app.

To create a story on My Story open the app and tap the icon to add an author. Then tap the author’s profile icon and select “add a book.” Tapping “add a book” will open a blank canvas on which you can draw and type. On each page you can also insert digital stickers, import pictures from your iPad’s camera roll, and record your voice. Tap the book icon in the lower-left corner of the canvas to add a new page to your book.

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Stories created through My Story can be shared through a variety of channels including email, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Drive. To share stories you have to answer a math problem. Solving the math problem before sharing is a step intended to make it difficult for young writers to accidentally share their books.

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Try Creating Comics to Get Students to Share Stories About Themselves

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I shared this idea on Free Technology for Teachers earlier today and I’m sharing it here to bring an iPad slant to it. At the beginning of the new school year it can take a while for new students to open up to each other and to you. One way to get them to share stories about themselves is to have them put it into a fun comic story. Through creating comic stories you can have students share favorite stories from their summer vacations. In the process students learn how to use a new tool, practice developing storylines, and they let you in on a little bit of who they are as people. Here are three iPad apps that I like to use to create comic stories.

Screen-Shot-2013-02-24-at-9.38.55-AMStrip Designer is a great comic strip creation tool to add to your students’ iPads. Priced at $2.99 it is $2 less than Comic Life and is just as good. Strip Designer provides dozens of comic strip layouts from simple one frame comics to one page layouts in a variety of configurations to multiple page layouts there is probably a layout that works for all students. And if not, your students can create their own custom comic strip layouts in Strip Designer. Strip Designer allows students to create comics from scratch by drawing pictures, taking pictures, or importing pictures. Students can import pictures from a variety of places including Facebook, Dropbox, and the camera roll on their iPads. Each frame in your students’ comic strips is created individually and is not tied to an overall theme. This means that one frame in their comic strips could be based on a photo and the next frame could be based on a drawing. The borders and shading effects for each frame can be individually adjusted too. To help students really tell stories through comics, Strip Designer offers a slew of text editing tools, digital stickers, and drawing tools.

Screen-Shot-2014-07-07-at-8.02.52-PMHalftone 2 (currently $1.99) is a nice iPad app for creating simple comic strips based on your pictures. To get started with Halftone 2 you choose a layout for your comic then import pictures from your iPad’s camera roll. You can add borders and visual effects to each of your imported pictures. After arranging your pictures you can add text in a variety of comic styles. Completed projects can be shared in a variety of ways including email, Dropbox, Twitter, and saving to camera roll. Halftone 2 is a good app for use in a classroom in which students share iPads because it does not require students to create accounts in order to create comics.

 

Screen-Shot-2014-03-07-at-2.41.35-PMMake Beliefs Comix is a free multilingual comic strip creation app. The best feature of the app is that it supports the creation of comics in seven languages; English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Latin. The free Make Beliefs Comix iPad app allows students to create two, three, and four panel comic strips. To create comics in the Make Beliefs Comix iPad app you simply select the number of frames you want to use then choose the characters that you want to feature in your story. After choosing your frames and characters you can type text into speech bubbles to tell your story.