Making the Most of iPads in the Classroom

With the wealth of iPads available for use at the elementary level, I thought it would be a great time to highlight some of the apps that are currently installed. If you have a personal iPad, you may find these apps useful as well. There are quite a few installed apps for skill-based practice, but the apps I am going to focus on will, in many cases, help move students from consumers of information to producers or will help them apply what they've learned!

I tried to break the apps down by category, although some may actually fit into more than one. It would be great if we could have the apps sorted into folders on the iPads, but with the way the updates push out, that isn't currently possible :(

Robotics-Sphero EDU & Sphero Mini (for use with the Sphero Mini robots), LEGO Boost (for use with the LEGO Boost kit), WeDo 2.0 (for use with the LEGO WeDo 2.0 kits), Wonder, Xylo, Path, Go, Blockly (all for use with the Dash and Dot robots), Droid Inventor (Little Bits R2-D2 Droid Inventor kit)

*Note: the robots for use with these apps may not be available in all buildings, but if you'd like to borrow something, let me know!

Coding-Hopscotch, The Foos, Scratch Jr

Osmo-Pizza Co., Osmo Monster, Coding Duo, Osmo coding, Numbers, Masterpiece, Newton, Words, Tangram (see previous post about Osmo here!)

Google apps-Drive, Docs, Slides, Sheets, Classroom, Hangouts, Google Earth

Formative assessment-Plickers, Flipgrid, Kahoot, Nearpod, Explain Everything

Digital portfolios-Seesaw, Class Dojo

Notetaking/Organizing ideas-Popplet Lite, Dragon Dictation, Notepad +

Create Videos-iMovie, Spark Video, TeleStory

A few others: ActivCast (mirror devices with the new ActivPanels), QR Reader (scan QR codes-great for puzzles, scavenger hunts and more!), EdPuzzle (assign video lessons-great for flipped learning)

Mark Anderson (@ictevangelist-click here to see a larger version) recently posted a great periodic table of useful iPad apps, especially for elementary use, sorted by category. You may recognize some of them from the above list. If you check out a new app and think it would be beneficial, let us know by dropping a comment below!