iPad apps for teachers

Saving web articles and content for later: Pocket

If you want to keep it, put it in your Pocket! Pocket is so easy to use and brilliant that my whole family now use it. With 12 million users worldwide, lots of people like Pocket.

We all find great resources, web pages and articles that we want to keep for the future, or just to read later at our leisure. There are many bookmarking tools which offer different features and Pocket is a user-friendly introduction to this genre which you might find meets all of your needs. We are used to adding favourites to a browser and Pocket does this but allows you to add and view the content anywhere, not just when you are at one computer or on one network.

Fed up re-entering passwords?

Today's post isn't about an app but about getting you onto password protected websites more easily. Do you get fed up typing in passwords or often forget them? If yes, then Keychain is for you.

When you log onto the school intranet, if you only have to click the login button because your details have been saved for you then you already have keychain turned on. Alternatively if you are always having to type your username and password then you might want to save yourself time by using Keychain for this and other selected sites and those apps which the developers have enabled for Keychain access.

Christmas Fun

If you are getting in the mood for Christmas with a month to go, or would like to, how about a Christmas countdown app? Sleeps to Christmas 2 looks like the shot below and updates live. You can play a choice of Christmas music - or none - and have options of how to display the time too! There are lots of similar apps to this (see here for another) so you can take your pick.

Voice Record Pro

iPhones come with a built in audio recording app but the iPad doesn't for some reason. Garageband is a great tool for complex audio projects but if you want a basic audio capture tool there are lots of apps to choose from.

The one I am going to recommend to you was actually recommended to me by Valerie (again - Thanks, Valerie!). It's called Voice Record Pro and allows you to do most of the things you would want to do with an audio file, including:

Film anyone? BBC iPlayer and more

Relax, it's the weekend. Get some well-earned rest and catch up with your favourite TV programmes. Too busy for that? Instead prop your iPad safely on a book stand on your kitchen windowsill and catch up with your viewing whilst you cook dinner.

Everyone has heard of the BBC iPlayer on desktops and laptops but you may not know that there is also an app which lets you watch live TV, stream programmes (broadcast within the last 30 days) and also download programmes for viewing offline. It's sister app also lets you stream any missed radio shows (no downloading of these however). There is also a built in BBC programme guide. It is easy to use and lets you search by title or categories. Similar apps are available for ITV and Channel 4.

PDF Editors

Most people are familiar with PDF files and part of the reason that they are so popular is because, reassuringly, files stay the way that the author intended. The font and layout and everything about the document do not get adulterated when they are opened on another computer in the way that other document formats can do. For that reason they are popular for CVs, contracts and similar documents. PDFs are also fairly compact files so they are convenient for downloading too. Anyone can create a simple PDF file from Word, Pages, Keynote etc on their computer or iPad. Lots of apps can read PDF files with Adobe's Acrobat Reader (for Mac, PC and iPad) being the one most people will have heard of.

A bit more scanning

One app that I find myself using semi regularly in my own studies is Text Grabber. I remember that when I mentioned this app in a talk two or three years ago, several teachers were interested and asked about it so I thought it might be worth including in this app blog.

Text Grabber is an OCR scanner which allow you to scan in and then export text. Using OCR (optical character recognition) the text you scan with your device's camera is actually read and behaves as though you had typed it in. Additionally it can also translate the text into any of forty languages. This is great if you are reading a menu on holiday and of course it has countless other uses too. Personally I use it most to import paragraphs from a book when I need the precise text for quoting or as a reference in an assignment and I appreciate not having to type the text in myself.

Spotify Music

The music service Spotify has been around for a few years now and is generally considered to wear the music streaming crown because of its library, its coverage and the fact that it has different tiers of access ranging from free streaming (with adverts) through to its Premium account with no adverts, and the additional facility to save music to play offline on up to three devices (£10 per month, or free with an 18 month digital subscription to the Times newspaper right now). Whatever your account type you can explore a huge range of music and create playlists to enjoy and share with your friends.

Scan those documents.....

Do you ever wish that you had a flatbed scanner in your bag? Well, with scanning apps for iOS you almost have. I will be honest straight up and say that if you have an iPad 2, the camera is flatly not good enough to get the quality of images needed for these apps. Read on though because, should you ever find yourself with a device with a better camera, it is worth knowing about what they do.

If you want to capture a document or newspaper article you can take a conventional photo and this may be fine. If you use a scanning app, it still takes pictures using the device's camera but it does more than capture a snap:

Inkflow (Plus)

There are little apps that are nice to have on your iPad and Inkflow is one of them. This free app is a basic drawing app for iPhone and iPad that is great if you want to sketch, capture your signature and then easily send or share it (as jpg or pdf) or save it to your camera roll. The app is very straightforward to use and when you download it it has a file waiting inside the app for you which tells you how to use it.

Once you have drawn or written something you can move and resize your selection and zoom and pan around the canvas as needed.