AMAZING WAYS TO USE FREE APPS FOR iPADS IN THE CLASSROOM
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Please answer the following questions below
How are you using iPads in the classroom now?
What else do you wish you could do with the iPad in your classroom?
App Name /From the website: / “Edmodo is designed to get students excited about learning in a familiar environment. On Edmodo, teachers can continue classroom discussions online, give polls to check for student understanding, and award badges to individual students based on performance or behavior.”
How we use it: / We use Edmodo almost everyday in the classroom for a variety of purposes. Most frequently, we assign students writing tasks or quizzes to complete during independent work time. We also use Edmodo to give students a teacher-designed list of links to websites they should visit when collecting research or building background knowledge. Edmodo is also a great platform for posting links to videos. The design fostersonline discussions by allowing students to reply to posts publicly.
Best features: / *You can create an unlimited number of classes
*Teachers have the ability to reset a student’s password if they forget it
*Parents can make an account that links to their child’s account
* Everything is archived
*Edmodo stores a revision history for all assignments that students complete and submit so it’s easy to track growth
Things we wish it did better: /
- It would be great if students were given a bigger box to use when typing responses to assignments so they can see all they have written instead of just one line.
- When students navigate away from a response in progress then everything disappears. Edmodo would save teachers and students a lot of anxiety if it had an auto-save function.
Notes:
App Name /
From the website: / “ClassDojo is a classroom tool that helps teachers improve behavior in their classrooms quickly and easily. It also captures and generates data on behavior that teachers can share with parents and administrators. Better learning behaviors, smoother lessons and hassle-free data - and its free!”
How we use it: / We use Class Dojo to reinforce positive behaviors during academic discussions and independent work time. This app allows us to award students points for exhibiting positive behaviors such as raising a silent hand, using strong vocabulary in their responses, or asking a follow-up question during academic discussions. It also allows us to take a point away from a student if she or he is talking to a neighbor without permission, shouting out, or off-task.
Best features: / *You can personalize the avatars for each student
*Class Dojo tracks everything
*The random function is useful for picking class volunteers
*You can personalize the positive and negative behaviors for each class
*You can control the app from your iPad, iPhone, iPod, or laptop. It all syncs.
Things we wish it did better: /
- Currently, each behavior is worth the same value (+1 point). It would be great if we could assign different behaviors different values based on their importance in our classroom
- There are student reports that can be printed but there are no certificates of achievement that can be printed directly from Class Dojo to award students for reaching a certain number of points.
Notes:
App Name /
From the website: / “Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers by engaging their classrooms with a series of educational exercises and games. Our apps are super simple and take seconds to login. Socrative runs on tablets, smartphones, and laptops”
How we use it: / We use Socrative as a pre-reading activity that is typically completed at the beginning of class. Students are given a question that activates their background knowledge about a theme in the text and are asked to respond to it using Socrative. All responses are anonymous. Socrative compiles all the responses and allows us to send them to each student’s iPad in one list. Students read each other’s responses and vote on the one that they found most interesting. We have also used Socrative as a quiz tool but we prefer to use Edmodo for quizzes.
Best features: / *It does not require student logins
*It allows students to see a wider sample of responses instead of limiting them to the people at their group.
Things we wish it did better: /
- It does not save responses to short-answer questions if you are not using the quiz tool. If you want to save the responses you have to take a screenshot of the answers.
- There is no option to insert answer choices for a multiple-choice question unless you are using the quiz tool.
Notes:
App Name /
From the website: / “Google Drive lets you do more than just store your files. Share files with exactly who you want and edit them together, from any device.
Google Drive gives you instant access to Google Docs, a suite of editing tools that makes working together better—even when your teammates are miles away.”
How we use it: / We use Google Drive when students have to type an essay or a longer assignment. Unlike Edmodo, Google Drive allows students to view the entire document as they are typing. We also use Google Drive when students have worked together on an assignment and need to type their individual parts into a single document. If you have a desktop then Google Drive can also be used to create forms to collect student feedback. We use Google Forms to allow students to keep track of their performance on vocabulary quizzes. Google compiles all the data into lovely charts and graphs.
Best features: / *Several students can view the same document from individual iPads to work on a group project
*Everything auto-saves. If a student accidentally deletes all their work you can restore a previous version and retrieve it.
*Documents can be shared with the teacher without the student requiring an e-mail address
*There are more formatting options for when students need to underline book titles or italicize movie titles.
Things we wish it did better: /
- Google Drive does not allow you to add pictures on the iPad version of the app (this function is available on Android devices).
- Google Drive only allows you to create new documents on the iPad (not forms, spreadsheets, or presentations).
Notes:
App Name /
From the website: / “At Animoto, we live by two basic philosophies: make it simple, and make it beautiful. And we're proud to offer you the simplest way to create the most beautiful videos online, whether for yourself, your friends, your family, or your business.”
How we use it: / We use Animoto to allow students to present information they have learned from a unit in a creative way. Students collect relevant pictures and match the mood of the song to the mood of their content to create a professional looking video. These videos can be shared via links or embedded into a website. With an Education account you can also download videos to your computer.
Best features: / *You can use one class account to create several student accounts
*Pictures can be taken from any source
*It comes with an expansive video and music library to add to videos
*An Education account gives you “Plus” account features for free.
Things we wish it did better: /
- There are only 44 characters you can enter into a text slide which seriously limits students’ ability to include substantive text.
- It takes an incredibly long time to preview videos on the iPad (2-3 minutes)
- Videos that are started on the iPad can only be edited on the iPad initially used to create it.
Notes:
App Name /
From the website: / “Educreations is a recordable interactive whiteboard that captures your voice and handwriting to produce amazing video lessons that you can share online. Students and colleagues can replay your lessons in any web browser, or from within our app on their iPads. Check out the "Showcase" on our homepage or the "Featured" tab in our iPad app to view some great lessons that other teachers have created with Educreations.”
How we use it: / We use Educreations to differentiate instruction for students. It essentially allows you to clone yourself in the classroom. Instead of delivering vocabulary instruction whole-class we have put it on Educreations and allowed students to receive their words from the video. During writing instruction, we can record steps of the writing process on Educreations and allow students to move at their own pace. Typically, when we use Educreations there is a guided notes sheet that accompanies the video so students are recording information as they are receiving it.
Best features: / *Students don’t require an account
*You can create videos on the iPad or on your laptop
*You can add your own pictures
*You can set any background image (several math teachers place a grid as their background for teaching graphs)
Things we wish it did better: /
- If you make a mistake while recording there is no way to just erase the recording and keep what you’ve created on the whiteboard. You have to start everything anew.
- There is no way to type text onto the whiteboard when using your laptop. You must use the markers to draw text (there is a textbox on the iPad).
Notes:
App Name /
From the website: / “Bring the classroom to life with interactive mobile presentations that teachers create andcustomize themselves.”
How we use it: / We don’t use Nearpod as much as we’d like to but we included it because it is has awesome potential. The few times that we have used it, we’ve allowed students to use the drawing slide to illustrate their visualization of a setting. However, there are many other features available that make this app particularly useful for content-heavy courses.
Best features: / *Students don’t require an account, they just use a pin # to access the presentation
*The presentation automatically prompts students for their first and last names
*You control the pace of the presentation but students still have an interactive and personalized experience with it.
Things we wish it did better: /
- Many features are limited to the paid version
- Presentations cannot be viewed or launched from a desktop without the paid version
- The pin# for a presentation changes each time it is launched (you cannot add the pin# to notes the night before)
Notes:
Presented by Andrea Clay and Kristen Turner, middle school teachers at Lady Liberty Academy Charter School. Feel free to contact us at