© 2010 Traci Lawson, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio
I’ve been asked to write a short article listing the ten “best” mobile apps for the classroom.
I’ve got my ideas, but thought I’d invite readers to contribute their own, as well.
Leave a comment, or send me a tweet, with one-to-three of your favorite apps and, ideally, also write one sentence for each one saying why you like it so much.
I’ll publish everybody’s suggestion in a blog post here — of course, giving credit — and will also give you credit if your app makes my “top ten” cut.
I’d love to hear apps that can be applicable to as many content areas as possible, and am also interested in ones for math and science since I don’t know much either of those subjects.
Please let me know your suggestions by December 15th.
You might also be interested in:
The Best Mobile Apps For English Language Learners
The Best Sites For Beginning iPhone Users Like Me
The Best Resources For Beginning iPad Users
Top apps for us:
1. Explain Everything – used for screencasting across all subject areas to connect with Visible Thinking. Students save to Drive and share to their blogs.
2. Book Creator – a great app to bring in content from many other apps (Tellagami, Pic Collage, iMovie, Explain Everything, Popplet, Keynote, etc). Students can share final books to a shared Google Folder and they can then download each other’s books in iBooks.
3. Drive – We are a Google Apps school and Drive is an essential app for students to use to share and organize their work. We also use Hapara Teacher Dashboard as a tool for teachers to see student content in Drive and Blogger.
The struggle, is the lack of full features in Drive and other Google Apps (Docs, Sheets, Slides) on the iPad.
Remind – As a parent and a student I love the flexibility to receive messages via email or text. As a teacher i appreciate managing the contacts through Remind.
iMovie – I love skipping the step of downloading video and being able to edit on the capture device. This is the only app I have been willing to pay for on my iPad cart because of the creativity it unlocks.
Skyview – seeing constellations, satellites and planets superimposed on the night sky is mind blowing and makes astronomy come alive!
1. Explain Everything – If I could only have one app, this one would be it! I use it in every subject area, mostly for students to screencast their thinking process.
2. Virtual Manipulatives – I love this one for teaching fractions. Think of all the fraction pieces without the mess, plus there are conversions to percentages and decimals.
3. Google Earth – you can go anywhere in the world from your classroom: check out a book setting, travel for Social Studies.
4. iPad video camera – Not really an app, but it shouldn’t be forgotten. It’s simple, it’s there, and we use it often so students can see themselves in action.
WeChat (or Whatsapp or Line or Kakaotalk — all similar). They all get students writing, and writing a lot. Furthermore they allow the teacher to make corrections and suggestions on the fly – much better than correcting later when the attention level is lower. If the way to become a good writer is to write, then these apps are godsends, although admittedly not for learning to write 5-paragraph essays. That has to be done separately, but can certainly be planned and discussed within WeChat, etc.