iPad apps for teachers

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tellagami: A fun app for Friday

Tellagami is a fun app to play with. It lets you create characters (gamis) and place them on a background, which can be one of the built-in backgrounds or something from your camera roll. You can then make a 30 second recording like the one above. You can talk to your students from space, inside a cell or even chat through a formula!