Apple recently updated iBooks so that PDF documents could be read natively directly in the iBooks application. It is simple to add a PDF to the iBook bookshelf from iTunes with 5 easy steps:
1. Connect your device to a computer.
2. Click on the Books icon in your iTunes Library in the left side bar.
3. Drag the PDF from wherever it is saved on your computer and drop it into Books. (From here you can change the title, author, illustrator, and genre of the book if it isn’t displayed correctly.)
4. Click on the iPad or iPhone in the device list and click on the Books tab.
5. Make sure the box next to the PDF that you added is checked and that Sync Books is checked. Click the “Sync” button.
It couldn’t be easier! Now you can create custom textbooks and reading material for your students virtual iBooks library. Students can create their own “published” PDF books for their iBooks library and swap finished stories saved as PDFs.
What it is: Now this, my friends, is what I’m talking about! Ansel and Clair’s Adventures in Africa is everything an educational kids app should be. The app is truly spectacular with animations, quests, puzzles, games, excellent graphics, fantastic storyline and plenty of ways for kids to engage in play and learning. Ansel and Clair’s Adventures in Africa was designed for kids aged 4-9. When students enter the app, they are introduced to Ansel, a friendly inter-galatic travel photographer from the planet Virtoos, and Clair, a brilliant robot. Ansel and Clair introduce students to Africa where students can explore interactive locations including Nile Valley, Sahara Desert and Serengeti Plains. As students explore, they are asked to discover, help Ansel and Clair find spaceship parts and help Ansel take pictures. As students explore, Ansel asks questions that Clair answers with her encyclopedic knowledge. Students are deeply immersed in story and learning of:
Geography: continents, oceans, rivers, monuments and landmarks
Students can learn more with more than 50 screen overlays complete with text and illustrations. Throughout Ansel and Clair’s Adventures in Africa, students will find fun games and puzzles with multiple levels to challenge students at different ages and developmental levels. Games include a treasure hunt where students learn about actual Pyramid and tomb artifacts; a clock puzzle where they learn to tell time; Frog Life Cycle where they learn about the life cycle of a frog; a maze where they learn about omnivore, carnivore or herbivore animals and Fur Ball-a-tor where students identify animal patterns.
There is SO much attention to detail in this app. Students can spin, touch and learn geography on a 3D globe, explore the Sahara in the day AND night (that way they can interact with nocturnal animals), experience a sandstorm, learn about extreme temperatures, experience the wet and dry season of the Serengeti and watch animals migrate.
Throughout the app, students observe Ansel asking questions and using higher order thinking skills to learn about Africa. Critical questioning is modeled in every area of the desert.
How Ansel and Clair’s Adventures in Africa can enrich learning: Ansel and Clair’s Adventure in Africa is one of those wonderful apps that packs in all kinds of learning and important thinking skills. This app could be used to teach students how to ask critical questions, to improve listening and reading comprehension, to learn more about geography, to enhance a unit on Africa, to strengthen audio direction following, to enrich an animal adaptation unit or to let students “experience” history in a new way. Honestly, this is what I WISH every text-book looked like. This app immerses kids in learning in a fun and engaging way that encourages discovery and inquiry.
Rating scale: 1= low 5= Highest
Overall satisfaction 5
Graphics 5
Easiness to learn 5
Educational value 5
Fun 5
Overall performance 4.5 (Some screens take just a few seconds to refresh)
I cannot wait to see more from Cognitive Kid, they know how to make an educational app!
Devices: Compatible with iPad. Requires iOS 3.2 or later
Price: $1.99(iTunes Link) – I know!! You were probably expecting it to be more like a $10 app, at $1.99 it is a steal!
What it is:ARIS , which stands for Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling, is one of the most innovative applications I have come across. The application is still in development so all of the functionality isn’t available within the application just yet, but it is such an incredible application that I had to share it now. ARIS is an application that will allow you to create your own mobile games, tours, and interactive stories using the built-in GPS and augmented reality. Using the GPS and QR codes, ARIS will let students experience stories and learning in a way never before possible mashing up a virtual world of characters, items and media with the physical locations. ARIS lets you plant photos, characters, and multimedia within a game or tour. Students can even interact with virtual characters by asking questions! Right now when you download the ARIS application, you won’t be able to create your own tours (unless you sign up as an Alpha tester here), but you can play with the virtual tours and interactive stories that have already been created in ARIS.
Right now your students can experience STEEL which is a game about mining and smelting metals. In the game, students hunt for virtual mines located all around Madison and collect them for profit. Since we aren’t all living in Madison to try this game out using the GPS, QR codes are available for those who don’t live in the Madison area.
Mentira is another interactive that you can use right now with students. This place-based-game was created to help develop language skills in Spanish. Mentira plays like an interactive historical novel where fact and fiction combine to set the context and social conditions for meaningful Spanish interactions. While playing students investigate clues and interact with virtual characters to absolve their family from a murder in the neighborhood. The students complete the game by solving it, who-done-it style.
DOW Day is my personal favorite offering right now. In this game, students are plopped virtually in 1967 on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Students have to stage a protest against the DOW chemical corporation for making napalm for the war. Students take on the role of a news reporter and must interview and investigate different interests and the perspectives of virtual students, police, and DOW employees. Within the game students will find virtual characters, items, and multimedia that immerses them in the interactive story through augmented reality. There are QR codes available for this game for those of us who aren’t in Madison to try it out using GPS.
To see ARIS in action, take a look at the demo video below:
How ARIS can enrich learning: When ARIS is launched with full creation capabilities, the possibilities for use will be endless!
For an elementary classroom, ARIS could be used for a virtual scavenger hunt around the school. The first week of school, create a scavenger hunt where you leave virtual clues and items around the school for students to discover. This type of scavenger hunt would be a great way for students to become familiar with the mobile learning devices in your classroom, as well as give them a tour of the school, highlighting places of interest like the library/media center, lunch room, lost and found, and office.
ARIS is an excellent platform for creating interactive stories. I can’t think of a better way to bring history to life than this! Create games with your students using novels that you are reading as a class, to create scavenger hunts for other grade levels, or to bring history to life.
I am envisioning all you could do with this application during an election year, putting your students on a virtual campaign trail with a virtual campaign manager to guide them as they talk to their constituents, others in politics, and news organizations.
Bring any book to life by meshing it with ARIS to create an interactive story, this would be particularly good for mysteries, as students read the book, they can interact with characters in the book, searching for clues on their own.
How about using ARIS for a virtual dinosaur dig where your students act as paleontologists? How neat would it be for them to “discover” and “dig-up” dinosaur bones of their own?!
You could create a tour of math where students visit various locations on the playground and a virtual character prompts them to measure angles, or calculate distance?
Create an art tour where students can interact with various artists throughout history. Plant art replica posters around the school for students to find and at each art piece, the students can “meet” the artist.
ARIS is a natural choice for learning state history, the mobile device adds a “history” layer to the physical landscape in front of them.
As I said, the possibilities with this app are endless! I love that this application gets students out of their seats and discovering their learning. What uses can you think of for ARIS?
Devices: Native for the iPhone and iPod Touch but can also be used on the iPad
How to integrate Bloom’s Taxonomy of apps into the classroom: Bloom’s Taxonomy is by no means the best or only way to categorize websites, apps or other educational tools. However, I often find that for my purposes, it is a really nice way to organize tools so that I can find them later. It also keeps me (and my students) thinking about the learning process and keeps us all from getting stuck in a one-type-of-learning rut. Bloom’s is also extraordinarily handy for categorizing apps that don’t fit neatly into a subject matter or that fall into several different subject categories.
In the apps, I have given you a little guide. If an app cost money, I’ve added a $$ on the app. The others are free. The free apps are just as wonderful as some of the paid!
Keep the guide of apps handy for those parents who ask for your best app recommendations!
Tips: Use the Bloom’s Taxonomy app guide with my Bloomin’ posters! Stay tuned for BIG versions of the posters coming soon with my launch of the Learning Genome project on Kickstarter! Woot!
Please leave a comment and share how you are using Bloom’s Taxonomy of Apps in your classroom!
What it is: The Britannica Kids Ancient Egypt app let’s students explore hieroglyphics, mummification, the Pyramids, Tutankhamen, Cleopatra, the Ancient Egyptian world, dynasties of Egypt, the River Nile, gods and the afterlife, every day life, and 14 Egyptian Gods, and other Egyptian topics as they play a variety of games. Games include memory (matching type games), jigsaw puzzles, and the magic square. Students can zoom into an Egyptian map to see an up-close and personal view of the pyramids, “brush” off layers to reveal images of ancient Egypt, test knowledge with a quiz feature, and even tweet answers or post to Facebook.
How Britannica Kids Ancient Egypt can enrich learning: Britannica Kids: Ancient Egypt is a fun, informative place to start a study of the Ancient Egyptian culture. The app offers students great opportunities for exploring culture, life, and landscape of Ancient Egypt. There are several games built in but each provide students with opportunities to view artifacts from Ancient Egypt, interact with facts about Egypt, and familiarize them with life in Ancient Egypt.
Shipley 5th Grade Student Review:
Overall impression: This app is overall highly rated by us. Even though there is a ton of information, there are many games but they are not very educational. This app does have the educational value a kid needs, even if the games are a little distracting. After you learn all the information you will be able to take a test on your knowledge. Many people say this app is very fun. Overall it has a lot of very solid information and make sure you pay attention to it.
Tips and tricks: The main screen has many different things that you can check out. You use the wheel at the bottom to get around. The icons on the wheel are not always obvious. All the different features suit different people. Make sure that you use all of the app’s features because it makes it a lot easier to learn by trying all the features instead of looking at the same old thing. Make sure you have a general idea about Ancient Egypt before you go on the app otherwise it will not make sense. Don’t spend all of the time on the puzzles because you don’t get that much information. Overall this is a very good app and we would recommend this for when you’re studying ancient Egypt.
Rating scale: 1= low 5= Highest
Overall satisfaction 4.5
Graphics 4.1
Easiness to learn 4.7
Educational value 4.4
Describe educational value: learn new things and practice what you already know
Fun 3.6
Overall performance 4.4
Devices: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 3.0 or later
What it is: This may very well be the single greatest iPad creation tool yet. Demibooks Composer is the first iPad based authoring software. Do you know what that means??? It means that you hold in your hands the ability to create interactive books! Weeeee! Students and teachers can use this powerful authoring app to create interactive book apps (yes, I said apps) that include realistic physics, animation, sound and visual effects. This app lets you create books that take full advantage of the iPad’s capabilities. Finished stories can be shared to a Dropbox account, iTunes or published as an actual book app that can be purchased in the App store. Seriously, how cool is that?
With Composer, students and teachers have powerful tools that let them create interactive tools without knowledge of programming. Students will get a small taste of programming language as they use Composer with “if, then” commands. Composer is intuitive enough to have your students creating their own interactive ebooks in no time. Bam!
Composer lets students:
select from a portrait or landscape book
Import images and audio from a computer or use photos from the iPad
Add text and styles
Create frame based animations
Build pages
Add a navigation system
Add complex behaviors (like turning physics on or off, adjusting bounce, friction and boundaries, gestures, taps, touches, hidden objects, etc.)
Add and edit audio including music, effects and speech
Preview your newly created book in all of it’s interactive glory
Export and save work to iTunes or Dropbox
Share work with others who have the Composer app
Publish your book to the App store with Demibooks PrintShop web service
How Demibooks Composer can enrich learning: This app gives your students the power to create true ebooks. This is not just a book that can be read on the iPad. This is a book that they can make interactive. Students can publish creative writing, explanatory informational text, poetry, math story problems (and solutions), ABC books, phonics practice, story retells, historical narratives, etc. The list could honestly go on and on.
Demibooks Composer lets your students create everything that they imagine. It is a powerful tool that is intuitive enough for young students. As students work in Composer, they will gain a beginning understanding of programming with if-then relationships. Students will have to think as programmers, designers, illustrators, authors, mathematicians, physicists, and animators. Brilliant.
Devices: Compatible with the iPad, requires iOS 3.2 or later
What it is: Dragon Dictation is a speech to text application. To use it, students speak into the microphone and their speech is converted to text. The accuracy is impressive, even with difficult words or background noise. Students can use Dragon Dictation to compose notes, email messages, or status updates for a Twitter or Facebook account. Tap on a word that was misunderstood to get other suggested words or to delete it and type in the correct word. Highlight text and paste it into another document (Pages, Keynote, Notes, etc).
How Dragon Dictation can enrich learning: Dragon Dictation is an outstanding accessibility tool. It is a great tool for those who are sight impaired and struggle with typing on a touch device or communicating through text. Dragon Dictation can be used in the primary elementary classroom to help students spell and write. Often, young students who struggle with spelling have limited writing. This isn’t because of a lack of deep thinking, it has more to do with the hesitancy to write what they can’t spell. As a result the writing is limited. Dragon Dictation can help students write to their full potential using the breadth of vocabulary they know and not just what they can spell. Students can dictate an entire story, or they can dictate the words that they need help spelling. This keeps the students from constantly raising their hands requesting help with spelling. Dragon Dictation is a fantastic tool for brainstorming, students can talk through an idea and have written notes with their thoughts to refer back to.
What it is: Flipboard is an iPad application that takes social media and turns it into a personalized digital magazine. The way that Flipboard displays feeds is absolutely stunning. Flipboard lets you flip through Facebook and Twitter feeds or follow a specific Twitter list or user. With Flipboard you can like, comment on, and share anything you find. It is a completely personalized magazine and best of all, it is free!
How Flipboard can enrich learning: Use Flipboard to create unique personalized “textbooks” for your students. Create a classroom Twitter account where you post information and share links, pictures, and videos with your students. Each student will add the Twitter account to their Flipboard. As you add content via the classroom Twitter account, your student’s Flipboards are automatically updated with the new content. Send your students links, videos, and photos to enhance learning instantly. You could do the same thing with a class Facebook account that you update from. Older students can create their own Twitter accounts to share from. For example, if each student in class is learning about a different country, students could update their Twitter account with links, videos, information, and photos that they are collecting. Other students in the class can subscribe to the Twitter account from their own Flipboards. There are some ready-made Flipboard channels that may also be appropriate for the classroom and learning.
Cross posted on my other site, iLearn Technology.com. Just like iLearn Technology, you can search any app by Bloom’s Taxonomy level. All of the websites I share on iLearn Technology are completely FREE, the apps I review tend to be a mix of free and paid apps. At the bottom of each post, I share the cost of the app.|
|Kelly|
Fluency Finder
What it is: Fluency Finder is a fantastically handy app that I learned about from my friend @dkapuler. David was kind enough to offer Team Anastasis some download codes so that we could try the app out with our students. Any teacher who has ever done fluency tests knows that they can be a little bit of a pain. Folders and folders of passages to store, stop watch, scribbled notes on the page as they read, calculator, and keeping track of it all in an orderly fashion to refer back to later. I’m a huge fan of anything that can help minimize the paper I have to store and keep track of in my life. Fluency Finder takes care of all of this! Not only can you record results, you can also maintain records on a class full of students and share information. You can easily find and track fluency rates so that you have more time to help students strengthen reading skills and find books that are confidence-building and enjoyable.
Fluency Finder makes it simple to assess reading fluency in 1st-8th grade reading levels. To get started:
Add students to the app
Select an appropriate grade level passage for the student to read
Print the passage from the www.fluencyfinder.com website (students could also read from their own iDevice or computer if you want to save paper)
Begin assessment, start the app timer as the student begins reading
Student will read from printed passage as you follow on your iDevice marking any mistakes
Tap the (+) button when student makes a reading mistake
Tap the (-) button if the student self-corrects a mistake
End the timer when the student finishes
Tap the “finish assessment” button to instantly see results
Now instead of focusing so much on keeping track of the fluency and score, you can focus on what actually matters: listening for fluency, comprehension and expression.
Being a paperless school, we are LOVING this option for helping students choose books that are at a level that is “just right.” It gives us the opportunity to help students hunt down the perfect amount of challenge and really focus on a story they can love. We are all about encouraging an absolute love of reading!
What it is: Go Sky Watch Planetarium is an incredible application that puts t night sky in the hands of your students. This planetarium displays the night sky with the correct orientation of wherever students are. This means as your students move the iPad around them, the application adjusts to show them what is in the night sky above them in real-time. This application couldn’t be easier to use, just open it up, point it at the sky and start exploring. The application uses the built-in accelerometer and compass navigation to make the sky come to life. The graphics in this application are incredible, your students will feel like they are actually looking up at the night sky and discovering stars, constellations, planets, and the Milky Way galaxy. In addition to discovering the universe by moving the iPad around, students can also do a search by planet, constellation, deep sky object, star, or star light date. An information window can be pulled up that displays information about the star, planet, constellation, or deep sky object that is being viewed.
The preferences offer an added layer of features to Go Sky Watch where students can change the display to night mode (this give everything a red tint), display star color, the Milky Way Galaxy, object images, and day light. Students can add a horizontal grid overlay, celestial grid, ecliptic, or horizon lines. Constellations lines, boundaries, and images can be turned on or off as well. Students can even decide whether to show Pluto as a planet (since I’m old-school, I say yes!).
How Go Sky Watch Planetarium can enrich learning: Go Sky Watch Planetarium will capture your student’s attention and have them exploring the depths of space first hand. When I hand a child an iPad, this is the application that they are continually drawn to. Students can be the guides of their own tour through space as they tilt and twist the iPad. Send your students on a scavenger hunt to find different planets, stars, and constellations that they are studying. Use the application to help students “map” the night sky on the classroom ceiling. Students can create constellation cutouts, label paper stars, or create paper versions of the planets to map the sky above their classroom. Travel through space as a class and make “stops” along the way to learn more about stars, galaxies, or planets that you encounter along the way. If your students have access to video, this is a great time for them to make a connection and learn more about what they are seeing. This application brings space to your classroom in a way never before possible.
If your policy allows students to do so, send the iPad home with students so that they can take their family on a tour of the night sky when the sun goes down. They will love being the “experts” as they teach their families about the night sky. This is a great way to involve families in learning together!
Fluency Finder
