iPad apps for teachers

Revision: Student resources for all subjects

In the previous post we considered all-in-one revision sites which give students the opportunity and framework to create their own revision materials, with a place to store their revision resources. Those same tools, GoConqr, and Let's Revise also contain revision materials produced by other students which of course can vary in quality.

There are another set of sites which offer revision resources for all subjects(content) based on their own content. This ideally solves the problem of using material that is of questionable quality or authority.

These types of sites can be fine for basic fact acquisition but still don't always say exactly what you would say or precisely cover the syllabus that they say they do.

Gojimo

Gojimo is a web site and app tool to test yourself on entrance exam or public exam questions but not your own material (so not useful for Y7-8). Additional questions are available from OUP and McGraw Hill Education but although this paid content says it exists I couldn't find a way to buy it so at the moment can deduce that this is basically free. An account is optional but worth doing if you want to record your progress.

Gojimo has a large question bank but the numbers of questions seem to vary a lot according to the topic. I have done a short video so that you can have a look at it here.

Revision World

Again this UK based site is focussed on GCSE and A Level and like GoConqr and Lets Revise from yesterday's post, also has the facility to help you to create an exam timetable. Like S-cool it also looks forward to jobs and university which I think is interesting in terms of helping students focus on the outcomes of their exams.

You choose a subject, a topic and a sub topic and then the site presents you with reading material. From there you have several options

You can register with the site to:

View the entire content of the site
Print out revision pages, chapters and complete modules in print-friendly format
Download and save PowerPoint presentations, files and images
Ask our subject guides for help (students only)
Receive email updates and exclusive member competitions (students only)
Enter competitions (students only)
Take part in discussions (students only)

So I signed in with my Facebook account and accepted the terms and conditions to see what I could do. The layout and design of the content is uninspiring and whilst I am not in a position to judge the content for different subjects what I did read seemed fairly OK. I think that students would have to be pretty motivated to plough all the way through the long pages. There is a 'quick revise' page for each sub topic which presumably contains just the core content.

Apparently written by freelance teachers, the website says:

RevisionWorld.com was launched in 2007 with the aim of providing a fun and free revision resource for GCSE and AS & A2 Levels.

RevisionWorld.com has been designed to provide you with the foundations of knowledge needed to pass each subject. Whilst not aligning itself with a particular exam board or syllabus RevisionWorld.com aims to cover the key aspects of each subject.

RevisionWorld.com is currently developing a variety of interactive modules and different ways to learn which will be online shortly.

Apart from a few videos, there is very little here that you couldn't do with paper so presumably the web is just the publishing medium, rather than offering any additional benefits apart from a little student interaction.

S-Cool

S-cool claims to be the UK's biggest revision website but again is GCSE and A Level up. There are no quick ways to sign up, you have to do it the old fashioned way. It is based on online notes with occasional exercises and animations. To be honest it is a textbook that happens to be online. There is nothing interactive, no instant feedback. Nothing! After you have (1) studied the material you can (2) answer the questions which you have to mark yourself and (3) read their revision materials. I think it might appeal to those with big gaps in their notes and knowledge but not one I would recommend and certainly not a tool that really takes advantage of technology.

BBC Bitesize

BBC Bitesize is slowly switching over to be mobile friendly so is moving from this site to this site and just had to be included here for completeness even though everybody knows it and it still continues to be extremely popular with students themselves. I would be interested to know if teachers are still recommending it as much as ever? Although the move from site to site is partly about being mobile friendly there are still some activities on the new site which require flash.

They don't fit into the category of tools that students might access by themselves, but for completeness:

Times Tutorials

This possibly shouldn't be included here in this post as it isn't for all subjects, it is just for Maths, English and Science but Times Tutorials is designed for parents to give their children a boost at all levels so it is probably worth knowing about. It offers a £1 cost 14-day trial if anyone is interested in having a look.

It also offers a schools package including a free one limited to 100 worksheets per month.

GCSE Pod

http://www.gcsepod.com This sounds quite good but is accessed via school subscription only and costs around £6.50 per year Y10/11 student.

It is interesting to think about what makes something an online learning resource and what makes something a revision resource and when one trips into being the other or not.

Revision: All-in-one solutions

These all in one solutions that try to help the student with both their organisation and engaging in revision activities

We all try to help students improve the skills they need to help them prepare for tests and exams but sometimes even with our help it is hard for students to know where to start and keep going.

We know that the activities that really help students learn usually require significant effort and therefore can often be hard for the student to initiate. Getting students into good habits when you only see them intermittently can be difficult. Online tools and apps may help with raising student activation levels and keeping them motivated.

To help students get to grip with the whole business of revision several companies have developed what I am going to describe as ‘whole solutions’ which try and take children through a range of activities associated with the revision process. They start with creating a revision timetable, move on to making notes, quizzes and revision diagrams as well as discussing revision habits and giving general advice.

Let’s have a look at two of these now to see what they can offer so we can decide whether or not to recommend them to our students.

GoConqr

GoConqr (which was formerly Examtime) is a freemium web based tool with an accompanying mobile app. You can sign in using your school Google account which is a plus. The app can be used for viewing and revising study materials which have to be created using the GoConqr web interface. A quick explore reveals that this tool has a nice revision calendar interface and which unlike Get Revising doesn't try to schedule your revision sessions for you but instead let's you put them in manually. You have the option to print the resulting calendar off or add the revision times to your usual electronic calendar.

The ability to create different types of study resources very easily on a web based platform (i.e. no installing software) which are all stored together along with a fairly simple interface is GoConqr's main advantage. The disadvantage here is that the free version is limited to three subjects/20 resources. With the free account anything you make is public which I think is actually quite a good idea.

It has a section for teachers built in! Here's a two minute look at GoConqr.

Get Revising

http://getrevising.co.uk/ A freemium web based social learning platform which is part of The Student Room Group. It's website says:

Students plan their studies, use our tools to create resources to help them learn and then discuss and share resources with others. From revisions notes to quizzes, word searches, mindmaps and flash cards, however students learn, they can find others who learn in the same way.

Students can create private study groups to work with friends from home, build a revision timetable to help structure their time and even make a personalised textbook from their favourite Get Revising resources.

You need a free account to create your own revision planner and make your own resources. It charges £6.99 per month for full access which appears to mean being able to use (and vote on) other people's revision resources instead of just using your own. However you don't need to subscribe to create and use your own resources.

I think that the benefits to this tool are having everything in one place and giving students straightforward examples with guidance of types of activities that can help them to learn. For example typing up revision notes also gives you the option to make little tests for yourself from your text and allows you to add in your own images and then finally gives you the option to print everything off as a pdf. There are how-to videos for all of the activities to make it as easy as possible to get started using the software. This could be a good tool for students who don't know where to start revising or don't realise that revising needs to be an active process where you parse and process material.

Content is organised by subject, exam board and topic or you can just use the search tool to find specific material.

I can see that this could be very helpful for some students but I wonder if more able to students would quickly outgrow it although it appear university level students are using Get Revising so perhaps I am wrong!

Get Revising are offering free access to the subscription service for teachers so you can go and check out the content there for yourself.

Get Revising was a BETT awards finalist in 2010.

Printer Pro: Free app of the week

Writing about iPad printing in a school that doesn't presently have this facility is asking for bother but I still think it is worth knowing about this app so here goes.

Although using mobile devices minimises the amount of printing we need to do, there are inevitably occasions when we either need or want to print from our iPads. Although currently in school we aren't printing from iPads, lots of us (staff and students) do print at home from our different devices.

School Dictionary recommended by the English Department

Our guest blog this week is by David who has written about the app and website Dictionary.com

I use the Dictionary.com app in English. It's a downloadable dictionary that the girls have on their ipads and can access even when offline. They like the way it is laid out and it has lots of useful features: a word for the day, a word blog which has some interesting posts about language, and even a 'trending words' section which records which words have been looked up!

Having this on the ipads means the girls are far more proactive about looking up words they don't know or checking spelling and it certainly saves time. It is also very useful as an aid for expanding vocabulary - there is a thesaurus section and a synonym button which gives examples of similar words used in context. I recently used it with Year 8 to encourage them to think about broadening their vocabulary and avoiding those awful words like 'nice' and 'good'!

Fancy some culture?

The Google Cultural Institute is something many people have never heard of but is an amazing educational resource. It is a web-based resource that covers Art, History and other culturally significant artefacts and ideas from museums and galleries across the globe. Read about the Google Cultural Institute here and access resources for History and Geography teachers here.

Read a 2013 Guardian interview with the Director of the Cultural Institute here.

The difference between this and a lot of other websites is that every single image is in extremely high resolution, as well as enriched with a whole host of tools and meta data. For example you look at a museum's Vermeer, zoom into it, compare it with another one, and then take a virtual walk through the museum by using our street view technology. (Amit Sood, from Guardian Interview)

If you have never visited, I would heartily recommend putting aside a bit of time and treating yourself to a tour. There is help and a video guide built in to get you started.

Word Clouds - quite an insight

I think that most people have seen word clouds these days but I recently popped the text of one of my blogs into Tagxedo and was really surprised at what came out. Before now I have helped people to create contrived clouds with an explicit embedded message but my own cloud made me re-realise their actual purpose as a great way to picture text. Examining my own result (above) showed me what an effective way they are to summarise a piece of text in a fun way, particularly when you add a relevant shape into the presentation. I found my cloud interesting to read as it showed me the emphasis of what I had written, something which is not easy to do when you are just scanning text. I thought I would flag word clouds here in case you needed some way to encourage students to examine or explore some text with a twist.

Do you eChalk? Perhaps worth a look....

There are some great established educational resources out there which are gradually being migrated to the iPad. Once such tool is eChalk which has been around for at least ten years but was originally, like many resources, written all in flash and therefore would not work on a mobile device.

eChalk, if you haven't heard of it, is a global teachers' favourite online resource with interactive activities and games, some resources are free but most are accessed via a school subscription. It is mainly used in our school by Maths and Science (I believe) but it would be great to know if other subjects also find it useful since it now covers many curriculum areas.

iPad Photos app

One of the best things about having an iPad in school is being able to take photos easily and to then be able to share those images with students and colleagues. From conversations I have realised that lots of people haven't had the time to play with their Photos app and don't realise what it can do so I thought I would just mention a few of the features here.

In the photos app you can you view and delete stills and videos, you can also favourite them (heart), file them into your own albums, and display images in an automatic slideshow with music from your iTunes library. Additionally you can make permanent changes to your images:

Grafio lite - beautiful and easy diagrams

Producing graphic images on a PC can sometimes feel like a hurdle. Sure Microsoft have introduced SmartArt whose predefined formats can be a blessing when they correspond to what you need but are a barrier the rest of the time.

Can I introduce you to Grafio, my favourite app for diagramming on the iPad - not forgetting of course that anything you draw on your iPad can be used on your computer in documents you are working on there. Grafio makes creating amazing looking diagrams both easy and fun - I love it! It's not just me either, I know one deputy head who loves Grafio so much that she uses it capture ideas during meetings and shares the resulting work as people leave the room.

Web apps - make life easier

Do you know what a web app is? A 'proper' web app can be made by iOS developers to appear like a normal application but it is actually running in a modified Safari window, i.e. you need to be connected to the internet for it to work, it is not self contained like a conventional app. GoogleDocs is an example of a web app that runs on any browser.

You can also create your own simple web apps on your devices for your own convenience. They are essentially shortcuts to important or frequently accessed websites. For example, I have one that takes me to the Met Office weather page. If you look on my device, it looks like an app but it is actually a web app: it requires a connected browser to work.