8 Things to Look for in An Educational App. Picking up the right educational apps to recommend to your students and kids is not an easy task.There are several criterion you need to consider before you can comfortably claim that an app is educational or not.
Of course there are no hard and fast rules to follow to be a good app reviewer and app reviewing is not an established science with clear boundaries but what we talk about here are simple conventions. These conventions are developed by experienced educators who , out of their long experience with app reviewing , have developed a sense of what works and what does not for educational settings. Experience here is very important because sometimes people learn more through experience than through formal instruction. That being said, I want to share with you some of the tips that educational app reviewers use to select apps for teachers and students. I have created the graphic below to include as many of these tips as possible. Educational Apps Checklists Every Teacher Should Have. Ways to Evaluate Educational Apps.
I am conducting a series of workshops in Florida and was asked to share a rubric to help teachers evaluate educational apps as part of the workshop.
In 2010 Harry Walker developed a rubric, and I used his rubric (with some modifications by Kathy Schrock) as the basis for mine. (Read Harry Walker's paper Evaluating the Effectiveness of Apps for Mobile Devices.)