iPad apps for teachers

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.

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!

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.