As a teacher-centered resource for educators, this app’s interface is both intuitive and a pleasure to read through as its list of collaborative learning ideas, when tapped are broken down into more detail.  Educators can ‘favorite’ ideas, and then easily return to them later on.  There is also a ‘shake to shuffle’ feature if you’re in the mood for spontaneity in your class  This randomly selects an idea for you which you can easily integrate into your lesson-plan.

Collaborative learning has been around for some time, but teachers have begun to embrace it more and more- especially as the technology equipped classroom can have the tendency to isolate students.  The benefits of collaborative learning cannot be understated as by providing students the opportunity to work together it:

• Builds self-esteem
• Develops oral communication skills
• Promotes a positive attitude towards subject matter
• Enhances self-management skills
• Creates a stronger social suport system
• Improves retention of curriculum

Teachers will notice marked differences in their students after regularly using these ideas.  Child will learn to value the idea of cooperation and soon become fast-friends.  Give some of these ideas in Mis Ward’s app a try and you’ll soon see students can recall facts much more easily in the engaging environment that collaboration creates.

The app is Free so it’s worth a look!

A bit about the author of this app:

Miss Ward qualified as a Primary School Teacher back in 2007, and has worked at a variety schools in the North West of England since.  She really enjoys working with children aged 4 – 7 years, and has been using iPads in her classroom over the past year.  Bringing ICT into the classroom is her passion.  He became frustrated, using apps that she thought could be made so much better!

Miss Ward’s Collaborative Learning Ideas is the first app she’s produced with the idea that there’ll be many more to come. In fact, she’s currently working on an addition and subtraction app which is space-themed.  In addition to app development and teaching, she works alongside the BBC and Splinter Design (www.splinter.co.uk) on a suite of games, articles and worksheets for children aged 4 – 7 years.

Have a look at her website www.missward.co.uk where you’ll find a range of free resources that fellow teachers can use!

The iPads in the Classroom Guide by Annalisa Kelly is a key reference for those involved in iPad rollouts at all levels of primary and secondary schooling, inclusive of special needs, regular stream and gifted students.   Currently, this ebook is one of a kind available on the iTunes store .  No other ebook covers such a broad topic area in such a concise manner.   Best of all, this book is available for free.

Annalisa Kelly’s guide has a clear mission statement to “optimize student participation, engagement and learning outcomes.”  The numerous challenges and more importantly, benefits that accompany utilizing iPads in the classroom are a major focal point of this resource.  From understanding how to install apps to providing essential information about deployment tools such as Apple’s Configurator app,  this guide gives the beginner a solid background in what to expect in a school deployment on the technical side.  That said, even more attention is focused using iPads in classroom environments and these highlights are an essential read for any teacher.

Topics cover the multitude of concerns regarding using iPads in schools inclusive of cyber-safety, online etiquette, risks of cloud computing.
The landscape of education has changed drastically in just 10 short years.  As children spend increasingly more time engaged in interactive media, education must evolve and address the needs and expectations of students growing up in this new and exciting environment.  Our newest “Internet Generation” demands that we, as educators, adequately meet the needs of our young learners who have come to depend on this new technology as a way of life.

The iPads in the Classroom Guide does a great job of providing educators with essential guidance on so many levels.  Perhaps the most important is the coverage of Apps in its cleverly named “App-endix”.  Apps covered comprise of those that are currently used in educational environments with proven success.  Short summarisations of the apps highlighting strong points in educational settings show what is accessible for teachers in the app world.  Undoubtedly, many of the apps mentioned in this compendium will go on to become part of your app library and bring much utility and student engagement at your institution.

This is truly an app guide that all educators will benefit in reviewing.

Download the guide in the iBook Store. 

For an educational app to be successful, it needs to be interactive and provide benefit for students and youngsters. Far too many apps have focused on looking great and being stylish but have failed on the most fundamental aspect. Being able to provide an interactive and collaborative focus to education is at the heart of the best iPad apps and it is always good to see kids having fun while learning.

Interaction and two-way communication should be at the heart of most good relationships and businesses and it is good to see when a company takes user-feedback on board. This is the case with INKids’ Futaba, with their unique multi-player Classroom Games For Kids app. The app has been well received by critics including “App of the Month” by the Tennessee Board of Regents and a prestigious “Editor’s Choice Award” in the August 2012 edition of Children’s Technology Review. The makers of the app have been working with teachers to find out what they want in an update.

Teachers are constantly involved with the design of the  app
According to John McCann, a Director at INKids – they receive requests for new features to Futaba on a regular basis and take every suggestion seriously.  Based on valuable feedback from teachers using Futaba in school districts across the US, Canada, Europe and Asia the UI of the app has been upgraded to make the process of adding and organizing content even easier. Futaba’s content can be amended for multiple classes and each grade level in K5 and this is a powerful feature for tailoring the learning process for each class.

Mr. McCann indicated that audio was one of the most anticipated features that numerous teachers requested.  With a recent update, teachers now have the ability to add their own voice to the games with the added bonus of having some onboard content having voice audio already integrated. Giving teachers the ability to add their, or even their students’ voices to match the content helps in providing a higher level of consistency of teaching to a classroom and ensures that the teacher remains in full control of the educational output of the app.

Given that teachers have been providing the feedback for the updates to the app, it is no surprise that many of the improvements are based on the teacher’s interaction but there have been other improvements too. A single-player mode has been integrated and makes for a more genuine and exciting learning experience while studying alone.

While the multi-player element of the app is one of its strongest points, it is important to ensure that single players get the chance to learn and have fun too. The key benefits of using this app in single-player mode revolve around an increased opportunity for the development of memory retention as well as providing support for cognitive development too. This upgrade makes the app a vital purchase for home users or parents looking for their kids to have fun while learning at home.

Supporting the Common Core Initiative is just the beginning
Additional content has also been added for K-5 students and this is in line with supporting the Common Core Initiative across the United States. This additional content includes an added focus on:

• The 50 states of the United States
• American presidents
• Flags of the Americas, Oceania, Africa and Asia
• Over 1,000 synonyms from A-Z that are suitable for 4th grade students.

Close support with Apple has been well received
When we talked to Mr. McCann, he also suggested that recommendations for upgrades to the app have come not only from customer support emails, but  Apple sales representatives.  INKids regularly communicates with Apple’s representatives to learn about the most sought after features of applications that teachers could use.

During 2012, INKids, were privileged to get the opportunity to attend Apple’s Educator Sales Marketing Meeting – the event was only open to 30 developers, many of whom have had their apps featured by Apple. Many of the suggestions from the Apple Education Marketing team will apparently be rolled out during 2013, including a way to bypass Dropbox for sharing content – Futaba will soon include it’s very own free cloud service to make sharing content between devices easier for teachers.

Starting off 2013, Futaba Classroom Games has again received the distinguished honor of being featured as New and Noteworthy in the iTunes Store (Education).  The start of the school just after the holiday break has had many teachers looking for advice and recommendations for applications that support their curriculum.

INKids operates in the global marketplace and currently works with educators on all continents to ensure that the content of Futaba works well to integrate with their regional curriculum for the benefits of all students in K5 classrooms.   It would be easy for the creators of a successful and well received app to rest on their laurels and hope that interested customers find the app. It is therefore good to see that the team behind the Futaba Classroom Games For Kids app have been proactive in making their app even more indispensable for the classroom.  Combining fun with functionality is crucial to ensure that kids get the best learning opportunities and the upgrades and improvements have made this app an even more important purchase.

The app has a number of features that enhance the learning experience such as a memory card game that features characters in the book, professional narration, original music, and even an auditory memory game that helps assist with listening skills.  The developers also cite inherent value in the Emotional Intelligence in the story.  Beyond this, the app also features the added bonus of accurate highlighted text as a means to promote reading skills.  It is also replete with vocabulary specific to creepy-crawlies.

When children touch the monsters, they gnash, drool, and strike with sharp pointy claws. Not to scare as the monsters aren’t really that scary but they certainly entertain!  That said, my own son at 3 years old, asked me not to touch the monsters because he thought they might pop out of the page and eat us!  I’m sure he was just kidding…or perhaps he knows more about monsters than I do!

It is a well thought out application that brings storytelling to a whole new level and does it even better than some of the biggest names in storybook apps.  Inviting readers to interact with the story by shaking, tilting and tapping their way to discovery, author Amanda Noll’s first picture book comes to life and is sure to bring many enjoyable nights to you and your loved ones.

• Our Sun
• Each planet and their moons
• Dwarf planets
• Small Solar System objects such as comets, meteors and asteroids
• The Milky Way galaxy
• A really fun gravity tool that compares gravity fields across planets
• Help in conceptualizing planetary tilt, day & nigh cycles and season on planets
• Space Exploration and more!

Great animation with bright colours and adorable graphics of animals, numbers, letters, fruits, transport and many more elements will keep children entertained as they strive to find the pairs.  Sometimes games of this nature are very well intended but manage to fall short due to a lack of games or options. This is not the case with Match With Me which manages to provide hundreds of different cards for players to match. It is important that children don’t get into a position where they have played the game that often that they know the answers off by heart and the variety on offer from this app should ensure that this proves otherwise. As well as the bright visuals and stimulating game play, youngsters will be entertained by a number of mind-stimulating classical music tracks that are utilised by the app. For teachers or parents who look for an all-encompassing experience for their youngsters, the Match With Me app certainly hits the spot.

Being challenged is the aim of the game but time can pass very quickly thanks to the fact that children will be caught up fully in this app. Even though the matching part of the game can be enjoyed by children from a young age, there is a progression involved with the app. Educational fun facts are compiled for each card, providing the name of each image with some added fun facts about the card. This is good because it will help children to develop an understanding of numbers and of the world around them, moving this app from a simple puzzle game to an app that teaches youngsters about life. Granted some of the vocabulary in the descriptions is a bit complex- children playing with parents or older siblings will benefit from receiving explanations verbally, giving the opportunity for discussion during play.

A number of difficulty levels means children can progress with the app as well. If things start to get a bit easy, the difficulty level can be cranked up, providing a more difficult challenge. There is also a timer used during the games so children will likely return in an attempt to improve their best score, adding a competitive edge. If used in the classroom or amongst children in the home, this competitive nature can add an additional edge to the app.

With matching games shown to have a strongly positive impact on memory capability and a good level of positive reinforcement provided at the completion of every level, this app promotes positive growth for youngsters. The simplicity of a matching game may be something that many feel is best left behind but the innovation and excitement provided by this app shows that Match With Me is capable of bringing the joy of matching to a whole new generation of children.

Bring 3-D into your classroom

No doubt that 3-D has captured the attention of any tech enthusiast.  From TVs, movies and the 3DS from Nintendo, students and teachers are gradually becoming more accustomed to 3D as a medium for learning.  The iPad now boasts a 3D element which can be harnessed with the use of 3D glasses which can bring an added sense of realism to the classroom.

Although intended for older, advanced students, a perfect example of this is shown with the 3D Brain app. It is unlikely that a school would have access to a human brain, let alone that every pupil in the class can examine for any great length of time. This app provides a brain for every pupil, allowing the class to study how every region of the brain functions. This provides the setting for learning what happens to parts of the brain when they become injured and exploring the impact of mental illness. With 29 interactive structures available to choose from, there is great scope for learning from this app.

Transform the periodic table

As an app that has been on the stage since the dawn of the iPad The Elements: A Visual Exploration is always worth a mention.  It is an essential addition to any science teacher’s app library. The periodic table is at the heart of every science classroom with the table usually to be found hanging on the wall at the back of the classroom. It may be a familiar sight for most students but it can be difficult for pupils to pay much attention to the words on the wall. This is where bringing each element to life can have a strong positive impact on the learning process for a pupil but again; safety and budget may impact on a school’s ability to include working with elements in the curriculum.

Using the iPad and iPhone app The Elements: A Visual Exploration brings the elements to life, allowing pupils to see everyone element in action. The app begins with the standard periodic table but going through each element sees the touch screen being filled with the element, alongside important information and facts. Not only that but objects relating to the element can be explored with a touch or a swipe, helping to place the elements in the real world. Making sure that pupils see the period table’s impact on everyday life is an important aspect for teachers and exploring each element individually can give any pupil a head start in science.

Make science available for all

A similar app but perhaps more commonly associated with science classes focuses on frog dissection. This has been a controversial subject for many years with many pupils and teachers objecting to the practice. The use of the app removes the moral arguments over animal dissection in the classroom while providing all of the learning processes associated with the process. Frog Dissection not only brings the process to life, rewarding pupils for good work in following instructions in the cutting process, it provides added details and information about the frog’s organs. With quizzes at the end and additional information about frogs, this is an example of an app going above and beyond what would have been expected in a classroom environment.

The reduction of mess in the classroom that these apps provide will also ensure that they a winner with everyone in the educational process, including the cleaning staff!

These apps can be used by pupils on their or in pairs or small groups so there is the ability to work collaboratively. In fields like science, collaborative working and bringing different opinions together can be of great benefit so this is definitely an area of work that deserves to be examined further.

The video game world is as vast as the music and film industry combined, with sales revenue of new games expected to top Hollywood opening weekends in the near future. The downside to this, is that children are coming into the market as young as 3, with hardly any targeted software. Instead they end up playing games aimed at older and far more developed minds. The 2-10 year old bracket needs targeted apps that not only include children into the gaming experience, but also draw them away from the limited offerings of “kiss kiss bang bang” fare aimed at the pre-teen market.

This is what Nick Marks had in mind when he began developing Coop Phonics. He added “Parents feel good about themselves when they play with their kids. It is magic when parents play the game with their kids. It just feels right. It is an experience that parents and kids haven’t had before, they eat it up”.

Nick is no stranger to the game community; being Lead Artist at Activision and fleshed out such varied worlds as Shrek, True Crime and Kung-Fu Panda. It seemed a world away from what he had in mind for the educational cooperative learning app, Coop Phonics.

Nick became a parent, and like all parents he constantly asked himself, is working 12 hour stretches at a huge gaming corporation really what I want any more? Clearly it wasn’t and he decided to move laterally within the industry, to education. As Academic Director of Video Game Art and Programming at Art Institute of Los Angeles California.

Teaching children how to create video game worlds rather than watching them play his own, the buzz urged him onto making his own kids educational game. And the seed of Coop Phonics was born.

He believes that Cooperative play between children and parents at the crucial early stage is vital to firstly cementing a good positive outline of how games can be, and also inputting positive knowledge rather than simple task solving. He is so convinced by his idea that he feels schools should be using this software.

“The real game play of Coop is facilitating the parent and child interaction through sharing, laughing, and learning with each other. This interaction creates a social learning experience that is weirdly revolutionary”. Says Nick

The iPad/iPhone app itself is a vibrant colourful world where colour and sound is almost ramped up to a level of pure wonder, a place where a child feels at home. And with parents playing alongside, can find a centred gaming experience. With its chunky cartoonish graphics and captivating story, the game draws you into a learning world where the game is also the teacher.

Guiding them through the basics of phonic principles until reading becomes second nature. Both you and your child will be the heroes. Help your child rescue all the the animals from the clutches of the bad Red Witch.

To save the animals you must teach the animals and your child to read. Coop Phonics creates an environment that makes your child want to learn to read.

One of the difficulties of planning lessons is the “***!,  I can’t think of how I’m going to teach this” (aka writers block / teacher’s nightmare). TeacherPlan is just the tool to have for those situations when you want to come up with creative ways to teach a topic. There are hundreds of ideas from  ’carry out a (silent) debate’ to ‘describe the picture’, and while some won’t work for your lesson, many will. The beauty of TeacherPlan is that you get a very wide selection of teaching ideas and even then you can edit or rewrite ideas at the final edit stage of putting them into your calendar. TeacherPlan is available for iPhone and iTouch right now and is coming to the iPad soon. Find out more about TeacherPlan on greenbambooshoots.com/apps/teacherplan .

Teachers have long relied on flashcards as a way of encouraging their students to learn and study important concepts.  For their part, parents have always sought out ways to encourage and support their child’s learning in a fun, but beneficial, manner.  To many students, flashcards represent a simple way to learn important terms and concepts for upcoming tests or exams that they can take with them anywhere.  The idea of sitting down and writing out hundreds of terms and definitions on small index cards or pieces of paper can be both daunting and boring for many of those students – and especially for younger learners in the elementary grades.

Whether a student is in the middle of learning her ABC’s or a completely new language, the features that make up the Kids Flashcards application really do take learning to an entirely different level.  Flashcards is currently offered in 5 languages and offers learners the chance to learn 2 languages at once.
Beyond simply allowing students to access amazing pre-loaded content, the Flashcards app also gives users the option of recording and adding sounds to the existing content, ensuring that students will not only learn a term but will be able to pronounce it correctly as well.  This particular feature is especially powerful and beneficial for second-language learners.
In addition to the traditional flashcard approach, the Flashcards application also contains additional games to help preschool students truly understand a concept.  The Word Match game teaches word association to younger students by having them match a word with one of the application’s beautifully-illustrated images and professional-quality sounds.  The Spelling Game does just as it promises, and provides hours of fun and learning for toddlers and anyone else looking to brush up on his spelling skills.
Perhaps the one area where the Flashcards application is the friendliest is in the pocketbook.  Unlike similar applications that use the flashcard concept, at a price of $2.99, users can upgrade the entire Kids Flashcards application. It costs about as much as some developers charge for an individual game pack.  Educators do have the option of purchasing individual content packs for only 99 cents and additional language packs for $1.99.
When it comes to games that promise to provide a fun and enjoyable learning experience for younger students, few application in the iTunes store can match the quality and effectiveness of the Flashcards for iPad-Kids Flashcards application.  For parents, it is an affordable, well-developed tool to promote learning anywhere and at anytime.  For teachers, the app is a powerful way to help supplement lessons on some of the more important language covered in elementary grades.  For students, the Flashcard app is a fun way to learn and practice new language, and a solid excuse to pack and bring an iPad along on their next family vacation.