Apple: iPad Mini, iTV Now In Production, Analyst Reports. Reading Rainbow Returns As A Startup And An iPad App. Back in 2009, NPR ran a story titled “‘Reading Rainbow’ Reaches Its Final Chapter.” At the time, that probably seemed like a reasonable headline — after all, after 26 years, the beloved TV show was going off the air, the victim of changing government funding priorities. But it looks like there’s actually a lot more to the Reading Rainbow story, and its next chapter is starting in earnest today, with the launch of a new iPad app.
The app was created by RRKidz, a startup co-founded by Reading Rainbow host LeVar Burton and producer Mark Wolfe, which licensed the Reading Rainbow name and content from public TV station WNED. (It also acquired the Reading Rainbow Twitter account earlier this year.) Burton and Wolfe came by the TechCrunch office last week to give me a quick demo and lay out their plans. “Television was an ’80s medium,” Burton said. In building the app, the RRKidz team saw an opportunity to reach kids in a new medium. And yes, the app includes some of those bells and whistles. Three Ring | An App for Teachers to Create Educational Portfolios of Student Work with an iPhone, iPad, or Android Smartphone. 10 Incredible iPad Apps for Education.
Learning is rarely fun; it’s even less fun when being taught within the confines of a lecture hall or classroom. While this may be true, there’s no reason why you can’t make the process more entertaining and challenging. The tablet market has paved the way for educational resources in the form of slick, new apps, with text-books now being replaced by online downloadable versions of themselves.
An array of stunning apps are at your disposal waiting to be exercised, so with this in mind, we decided to whittle down our top 10 iPad educational apps for students. Evernote It seems wherever you look nowadays, there’s Evernote. . ➤ Evernote Price: Free Paper Winner at the 2012 Apple Design Awards for Best iPad app, Paper has taken creativity of app development to new heights. . ➤ Paper Goodreader You could be forgiven for thinking Goodreader as just as a PDF reader for the iPad.
Price: $4.99 Bamboo Paper – Notebook ➤ Bamboo Paper – Notebook iA Writer ➤ iA Writer Price: $0.99. 8 Educational iPad Apps for Grade Schoolers. How to create 'flip books' on your iPad with new app. A new app for iPad lets kids — and kids at heart — create ‘flip book’ animations on their touchscreen tablet. Creating “flip books” is a fun pastime for kids – drawing on every sheet of a pad of paper and making your doodles come to life by flipping quickly from the first page to the last – and now this animation technique has gone digital with FlipBook HD for iPad.
That’s right, your fingers can remain ink-free, and you might just save a few trees in the process. While it’s a tad confusing to get started – even with its built-in Help menu – once you get the hang of it, FlipBook HD is an enjoyable and powerful animation app, even for those whose talent is limited to stick figure drawings. The idea behind the FlipBook HD app ($4.99) is straightforward: By using your fingertip or stylus pen on the 9.7-inch touchscreen, you can create digital flipbooks and share them with friends and family. TinyTap App Lets Kids Create Customized iPad Books & Games. TinyTap is a new iPad application designed for kids which introduces a different angle on the “record-your-own-voice” storybooks craze, by offering a playable book or game you and your kids can customize with your own photos, camera shots, music, narration, and more. The resulting creations can then be shared with family and friends. And, for a little inspiration, the built-in TinyTap store offers a collection of pre-made games which kids can customize with their own voice and actions.
The app is targeted at 4+ and up, so I couldn’t really enlist my in-house kid app beta tester (aka my 2-year old kid) to give it a rundown. But in testing it myself, I have to admit that I’m not 100% convinced they’ve nailed it on the user interface. That’s too bad because if TinyTap’s workflow was more streamlined and simplified, it would be easier for them to add additional elements to the story/game design process. The app is a free download in iTunes here. For the Connected Mobile Classroom – Nearpod. I’m always interested in just how 1:1 will roll out with portable devices. So, when I heard about Nearpod, I needed to download it and test it here in dougpete labs. It works like a host/client and what really intrigued me from the beginning was the promise that it would act like Net Support School. So, I downloaded the host and the client to kick the tires. The host runs on an iPad and the student client would run on any combination of iPods or iPads in the hands of students.
The tagline from the website says “Make your lessons more engaging through interactive multimedia presentations.” If you’ve ever tried to do it, you’ll know that’s easier said than done. First, I turned to the teacher application on the iPad. It seems easy enough. I’ve already created an account and so just logged in to see what I could do. The only thing in “My Library” was the tutorial presentation. But, I’d like to see what it looks like on the student side as well. Working with the program is pretty slick. Fishing for Good Classroom Apps. Apps for Creativity in Primary Education. Already used on desktop computer in schools, I Can Animate now bring the stop-frame animations to the iPad. You can capture frames using the in built camera, display onion skinning, undo support, preview whole projects and can be added to an iMovie project for a really polished movie. Keynote is a presentation apps designed for mobile devices. You create presentation by simple touching and tapping.
Highlight your data with 3D bar, line, area, and pie charts, animated with new 3D chart builds such as crane, Grow, Radical, and Rotate. If you own an iPhone you can buy the Keynote Remote app (£0.69), which you can use to control your presentation through your wireless network. See where you are or where you’re going in map view, satellite view, or a hybrid of both.
Scan is a user friendly QR Code and barcode scanner. Move the Turtle: Programming for Kids: £1.99 Sketch Nation Studio: FREE J2e: FREE j2e is an on-line creativity tool designed for education. Explain Everything: £1.99 Phoster: £1.49. How One App Uses Digital to Empower Education. The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Three Ring Quick Pitch: Create and share digital portfolios of students’ work quickly and easily. Genius Idea: Three Ring allows teachers and students to digitize student work by snapping pictures or videos with their mobile or tablet devices. It keeps student work at the center of the conversation and ensures work isn’t reduced to a rote grade or forgotten in a filing cabinet.
Crumpled assignments drifting to the bottom of students’ backpacks may soon be an experience of the past. A new app called Three Ring is seeking to change the future of digital classrooms everywhere. With a smartphone or a tablet, the app allows teachers to take a photo or video recording of student work and then seamlessly view and share the work online. Image courtesy of Flickr, flickingerbrad. 1,800+ EDUapps. Top 5 iPhone Video Apps. Making a great video used to mean pulling out an expensive video camera and owning your own video editing suite. Now you can do many of the same things once exclusively reserved for a high-end equipment right on your iPhone without a ton of cash or a lot of training. The iPhone is capable of recording high-definition video suitable for the giant plasma screen in your living room, and there are a number of video editing apps out there to help you polish your video and add opening credits, sound effects and even a soundtrack into the mix — without ever leaving your device.
If you're more interested in sharing your video than giving it a professional look -– or if you want to share a masterpiece you've just created immediately –- most iOS video apps also offer the ability to upload your finished product directly from your phone to popular video hubs such as YouTube and Vimeo, where you can share them with friends, family and the world. Do you have your own favorite video app for iOS? App Filter: Best Meditation App for iPhone. Meditation and smartphones don’t immediately seem like the best fit. When your phone is normally a source of great distraction, it isn’t an obvious choice for a tool to help you calm your thoughts and your body. But most of us need a little help to tune out the hustle and bustle of daily life, and there are some great apps out there that will help you achieve that goal. I’ve been immersing myself in peace and calm this week to bring you the best meditation apps. While it’s been a lovely experience all around, only a few stood the test of time well enough to be considered for our best meditation app.
Meditator Simple is best, especially when it comes to apps for meditation. Of course, there is power in that simplicity. There is one mark against Meditator: it can’t continue without your input if it’s interrupted, so you might be well-served to put your device in airplane mode while meditating. Relax Melodies Relax Melodies is extremely popular, and it isn’t hard to see why. Headspace. Is TypeDrawing 3.0 Your Type Of Drawing App? TypeDrawing, a unique app for iPhone and iPad, has just received a major update. It’s now proudly set at version 3.0. One of our keen readers, Rich, kindly informed us about the update to TypeDrawing. “I’ve had this since the day it launched,” he added, “it’s one of my keepers, as I’m a fan of typography and nothing else does what it does.” Indeed, TypeDrawing is one-of-a-kind. There’s nothing quite like it in the App Store in that it’s the only iOS app that allows for, as its name suggests, typography-driven drawing.
TypeDrawing 3.0 is a huge improvement over the app’s previous version. If you can’t see the video embedded above, please click here. Drawings in TypeDrawing are now saved automatically in the app’s gallery. While you’re in the process of drawing something in TypeDrawing, a lot of new text, font, and color options are now at your disposal. Top 60 best free iPad apps 2012. On comparing iPad apps with iPhone equivalents, one thing rapidly becomes clear: apps for Apple's tablet are pricier. Many of the best free iPhone apps cost money in their iPad incarnations, and the quality level of what's still free is often ropey. But among the dross lie rare gems – iPad apps that are so good you can't believe they're still free.
Of those we unearthed, here is our pick of the best free iPad apps. Note that apps marked 'universal' will run on your iPad and iPhone, optimising themselves accordingly. For a mix of free and paid apps, check out our amazing Best iPad apps chart. 1. Annoyingly, some free iPad weather apps refuse to believe that the UK has any weather (or that the country exists), so AccuWeather gets props for merely working. 2.
The social networking giant has gone back-and-forth with its mobile apps, finally settling on this smart, native implementation. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Dropbox is a great service for syncing documents across multiple devices. 9. 10. 11. 13. Apps in the Elementary Classroom. One area that I have not written much about on this blog is educational apps. This is mostly due to the fact that my school has one first generation iPad and two iPod Touches for the entire school. We also ban cell phones and other electronic devices, so these are not available for use in the classroom unless the teachers specifically plan for the kids to use them for a lesson or activity, hand them out to the kids and collect them at the end of the lesson.
I won't pretend to be an expert on apps in the classroom, which is why I haven't covered their use here. However, with more and more schools investing in iPad carts, iPods and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, it's an important topic. What is the Role of Apps in the Classroom? Why should we be using apps in the classroom in the first place? What Does It Look Like to Bring Apps into an Elementary Classroom? Cost If you're not sure whether an app is worth paying for, the resources below should help. Helping Students Make Better Movies on iPad (or any device) | iPads and Tablets in Education. 14 Ways to Use Garageband in the Classroom. Garageband is a great app that I think any student or teacher using an iPad should consider buying. It is a multi-track audio editing app that is as robust as you will ever need (unless of course you teach audio production). Later this week I will be posting a new page full of Garageband resources for teachers, students and learning.
For now, you can get your brain juices flowing by reading the list below, watching the embeded ‘how to’ videos, and then go start playing with Garageband yourself! Download Garageband from iTunes here. 1) Create Soundtracks/Scores to Your iMovie Project – if you’re not already making iMovie projects with your students, you should read ’13 Ways To Use iMovie in the Classroom‘. 2) Teaching Dance in PhysEd - Dance is sometimes a difficult unit to teach because students aren’t interested or are embarrased or just to shy. 3) Podcasts – Use garageband to create podcasts. Check Out This Introduction to Garageband Video Learn About Jam Session for GarageBand. NearPod - create and share lessons on iPads in classroom - free. NearPod is a free service/app that allows you to create interactive lessons and then share them across iPads in your classroom. Teachers create interactive presentations and then share them with the class. Here's how it works. The teacher uses the Content Tool to create multimedia presentations and then share the content with the students.
The Teacher app allows the teacher to control the activity also. Students receive content and assessments on their device and then can submit answers and responses. The multimedia presentations start with a PDF file and then quizzes, polls, videos, activities and more can be added. It's free, easy to use, and a great resource to use with iPads in the classroom. Get it from the App Store: Symbaloo Goes Mobile. I’ve shared before how I use Symbaloo as a startup page for my computers. Rather than using bookmarks, I like the graphical approach that it offers to get to places I frequent daily. Very quickly. Symbaloo also allows you to share your webmix with others and you can grab what others are sharing and add as a tab to your own instance. So, my desktop browsers startup and I’m presented with: This is my own information portal. It’s very personal and friendly and gets me to where I want to be.
Yesterday, Symbaloo released an iOS / Android application that truly lets you take it all with you. Hopefully, there is a native iPad application in the works. At the bottom of the screen, you can share your webmix, search for others, or just share with friends. So, in terms of my own productivity, I really like this. At one time, I maintained a Student Reference Portal on a website. Like this: Like Loading... Related Having it all In "application" Symbaloo - Before and After In "Computers" A Great Symbaloo Mix. Edublogs Gets an iPad App. 7 Free iPad Apps for Educators and Students. A Nice Guide to iPad App Evaluation. Stick Pick app.
GoClass - Create and Deliver Lessons on iPads. Weotta Go: An iPhone App That Suggests Activities For Right Now. Apps for Early/SN Learners. Nearpod: An App To Help Teachers & Students Work Together Using iPads. Thirst for Twitter. Apps for Teachers and Students. Adobe Photoshop Touch Review - very nice app. 50 resources for iPad use in the classroom. Teaching With iPads / I love this app for early learners. It's a lot of fun to play and it adapts to the skill level of the user. The activities encourage interaction using pinching, swiping, dragging, and even using the gyroscope. This is a fantastic way. Top 20 Must-Have Educational iPhone & iPad Apps - List Of Must-Have Educational iPhone & iPad Apps | Tech Holik. 107 Favorite iPad Apps for K-8. SMART Notebook app for iPad coming soon!
Invasion Of The Moon Monkeys! | They're Multiplying…. iPads for Education | Victoria, Australia. 5 Cool Things You Can Do With Your Old iPad After Upgrading. Classroom Set up for the iPad. Story Wheel - Storytelling Prompts on an iPad. The LineTime App. Top 5 Best New Apps of the Week. Ways to Evaluate Educational Apps.
Curation project: Digital Learning Farm - Ap... Top Two for Notes. Storify Comes To The iPad.