For those with a significant number of iPads in your room, Subtext is a free app that allows for more of a collaborative reading environment. The basic use of it is for students to read books, articles, etc from the ipad and contribute comments and discussion to the document that then all others can see. Quizzes and Discussion boards are also available but differ little from Blackboard et al. The app does allow you to create groups to manage what different periods or reading groups are looking at which would probably be most helpful to elementary school or ESOL teachers who have a significant disparity of reading levels in the clasroom.
I'm considering using it for my Academic Decathlon classes because of Subtext's ability to read epub files and comment on them. Subtext will load books or documents from email, dropbox, and your google account. Registration is required but is free for all.
Pocket Justice is a great app made by Oyez and Justia.com. It's free until October 31, and then after will be a pay app. Go grab it today while it's still free!
Socrative is still a wonderful tool for the classroom (especially considering that it's free) but, after using it a few more times I'm running into some problems that I need to make you aware of and that I've already alerted the app producer too.
In using it I allowed students to use their smart phones and the iPads I have in the classroom. The students using the iPads had virtually no issues, but those that were using their smartphones encountered some issues that prevented the experience from being positive. One, when viewing an activity on Socrative on their smart phones they often had to scroll up and down to see all of the questions and answer choices, and too often as they scrolled the program interpreted the scrolling as an answer selection. I contacted the app maker to suggest adding an "Are You Sure?" response to answering the question to avoid this.
The other issue that happened more with smart phone users than laptop and iPad users was questions already answered would reappear. I also alerted the app maker to this bug as well.
Considering both of these issues I've decided to only use Socrative when either all my students have an iPad in their hands or if they're working on something else and can pass the iPads I have in the room around to each other.
If you're in a one-to-one iPad classroom, then you shouldn't have very many troubles at all.
I've been looking for an easier way to do stop-motion animation and common craft videos easier. This new app for the iPad is pretty close to what I've been looking for. iMotion HD takes video at intervals of your choosing. To make this most effective you'll need some apparatus to hold the iPad still. One of the most interesting functions of this app is that if you have a second iOS device, you can have one device as the camera and the second as the remote. This is a free app with no sign up required.
As your district discusses bringing iPads into the classroom, please remember that while iPads are,culturally, the most influential device out there-it doesn't mean they are the best for classroom teachers and the realities of different curriculums. There is no one-size-fits-all for K-12.
If you do decide on an iPad, here are a couple of things to think about.
1. you must have the projection adapter, otherwise its just a toy for teachers.(unless you're rolling them out to every student,in which case send me an email so I can come work in your district)
2. very few of the Web2.0 tools work on the iPad since they are mostly flash based.
3. While there are many cool apps, essentially the iPad, in a teacher's hands, is still a presentation tool.
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