iPad apps for teachers

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.

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.

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.

TED

TED will need no introduction for some people. If you are one of those who has enjoyed a TED talk in the past, go and get this free app and have TED talks streamed or downloaded onto your iPad for those moments when you are stuck on a train, waiting at the dentist or just need some inspiration. If you have never heard of TED, then go and get this free app and find out what you have been missing!

The app also allows you to search and bookmark talks, and has a few other nice tools too.

ClickView

ClickView is a tool for schools that is used to capture and save TV programmes to show in classrooms.

Last summer about sixteen staff attended a one-hour in-house training session with a ClickView trainer. During the session we were introduced to ClickView's new web interface, ClickView 24-7, which allows all staff in a ClickView school to save and edit their own footage from any TV programme broadcast 'free to air' in the last two weeks. This footage is then available indefinitely (which I guess means as long as the school continues to subscribe to the service). You could take a two minute segment from a news bulletin, an entire one hour programme, or even create your own playlists comprised of different extracts of different programmes.