App of the Day: Book Creator

Book Creator app for iPad ($4.99)...the #1 book app in 60 countries. It is an easy platform for creating epub books. Bring books to life by adding text, images, video, music and narration to tell the whole story. Submit books to iBookstore, read in iBooks or email to friends. Teachers and students can edit and annotate each other’s books with the “combine books" feature.


Watch this short video to see how easy it is.


Book Creator for the iPad from Book Creator for iPad on Vimeo.

Applications for Education: 
Book Creator is a great way for to demonstrate student understanding through student created work. Ideas for using Book Creator: individual projects then combine into one final project, create student reviews and combine into final class review, create book reviews, show and tell projects, timeline projects, digital storytelling, and much more. 

Benefits of Using Book Creator:
☆ Choose from portrait, landscape or square book sizes
☆ Import pictures or videos from camera roll, (ex. iMovie movies created)
☆ Record audio within the app
☆ Draw or write with freehand tools
☆ Add text using all the iPad fonts
☆ Send books to Dropbox, other WebDav servers (ex. Google Drive), iTunes to your computer or email
☆ Click here for Book Creator tutorials.
☆ Free version of Book Creator...click here

App of the Day: Highlight by Cohdoo

Highlight by Cohdoo is free today. Regulary $3.99. Highlight is a recording app used to capture your "aha" moments. Pause and resume the same recording adding more highlights. Later review your highlights adding notes or share/open recordings with others via Dropbox, email, Google Drive, Box, iMovie, Evernote.



Application for Education:
Highlight can be a great asset for the classroom. Use for student/teacher conferencing, student/student conferencing, verbal understanding for foreign language classes, interviews, reading fluency/pronunciation, etc. As you record you can tap the screen when you hear a moment that you need to refer back to. Now you don't waste time replaying the entire recording but just the highlighted moments.

Benefits of using Highlight:
☆ Free Today
☆ Take a photo while recording or add after the fact.
☆ Never lose key points.
☆ Saves space and battery of your phone.
☆ Share recordings.
☆ Replay on the big screen using the Highlight Player companion.
☆ Read Highlight Tips you mark during recording. Click here to learn how to add these tips to recordings.

App of the Day: Story Creator

Story Creator is a great app to use for digital storytelling. With Story Creator you can easily create beautiful story books containing photos, videos, text, and audio all in one gorgeous collection. Story Creator truly brings your best stories to life and easily allows you to retell and share your most memorable moments.


Application for Education:
"Digital Storytelling is the practice of using computer-based tools to tell stories. Digital stories usually contain some mixture of computer-based images, text, recorded audio narration, video clips and/or music. Digital stories can vary in length, but most of the stories used in education typically last between two and ten minutes." (University of Houston)


Benefits of using Story Creator:
☆ 100% FREE
☆ Add as many stories as you like
☆ Sharing stories with friends and family is as easy as email
☆ Backup stories online so kids can't accidentally delete your hard work
☆ Download stories on multiple devices - create once, experience anywhere
☆ Can add photos, videos, audio, and text
☆ Can add photos from device, Dropbox, Flickr, Picasa, or Facebook
☆ Supports drawing tool to make stories truly your own
☆ Create a personal book cover for every story
☆ Add your own voice - bring stories to live by adding your own narrative
☆ Add audio highlights - highlights makes it really easy for kids to learn how to read
☆ Leave comments on stories shared by friends

App of the Day: Explain Everything

Explain Everything is an easy-to-use design, screencasting, and interactive whiteboard tool that lets you annotate, animate, narrate, import, and export almost anything to and from almost anywhere. Create slides, draw in any color, add shapes, add text, and use a laser pointer. Rotate, move, scale, copy, paste, clone, and lock any object added to the stage. No account is necessary to use Explain Everything.

Application for Education:
With Explain Everything, an explanation can be recorded at the same time and this can be exported as a movie file to be watched by the students. Teachers can keep a record lessons for students to watch at a later time. Outside the classroom Explain Everything is a great tool for "flipping" the classroom. Instructional videos for students to watch before entering the classroom.

Explain Everything Video:

Benefits of using Explain Everything:
☆ Interactive whiteboard
☆ Annotate, animate, narrate on whiteboard, pictures, and/or videos
☆ Import and export almost anything to and from almost anywhere
☆ Create slides, draw in color, add shapes, and add text
☆ Rotate, move, scale, crop, paste, clone and lock any object
☆ No account is necessary

Download the free Explain Everything Manual on iBooks.

iTunes App Store: Education Collections

Did you know that there is a section in the iTunes App Store called Education Collections? The Education Collections section features 27 sub-sections including reading, math, physics, chemistry, music, writing, geography, astronomy and earth science, foreign languages, test prep, and lots more.

Apps for Teachers
Also included in the Education Collection is an Apps for Teachers section. The section has apps for classroom tasks, curricula support, instructional tools, personal organization, and reference applications. Free and paid apps are listed.

Special Education
A great new additional is the Special Education section. The section highlights apps for communication, emotional development, seeing and hearing, language development, literacy and learning, diagnostics and reference, organization, and life skills.

Other resources for educational apps and uses of iPads in the classroom:
☆ Tony Vincent's Learning in Hand Blog
☆ Richard Byrne's iPad Apps for School
☆ iPads in Schools Livebinder
☆ TCEA iPad App Resources
☆ The Mobile Native Blog

App of the Day: Doceri

Doceri combines screencasting, desktop control, and an interactive whiteboard in one app, you’ll never have to turn your back to the class or audience again. This definitely is my new favorite app for presenting material. Download the Doceri Desktop for your Mac or PC by clicking here (there is a cost for the desktop version and is needed to run the app from your iPad).

Application for Education:
Forget Apple TV and try Doceri. With Doceri your iPad becomes a wireless interactive whiteboard or take control of your laptop/desktop with the app. The app provides multiple whiteboards to choose from, i.e. chalkboard, grids and graphs of different sizes, maps, music staff, construction paper, ruled paper, etc. Run software from your laptop/desktop from your iPad. This app allows the teacher the freedom to move around the classroom freely, give the iPad to students to solve the issue in hand (math equations, graphing, etc), annotate still images or PDF files, and have visibility on a whiteboard instead of a blank white slate.

Benefits of using Doceri:
☆ CREATE hand written or hand drawn Doceri projects on your iPad
☆ CONTROL a computer through your iPad.
☆ PRESENT anything from your Mac or PC connected to a projector, using Doceri’s desktop software.
☆ SHARE still image captures, multi-page PDFs or audio/video screencasts via email, iTunes, YouTube or Facebook.

App of the Day: 9Slides

What is 9Slides?
9Slides is online interactive presentations. With 9Slides you can add video or audio commentaries to upload PowerPoint presentations or PDF files. Users can access 9Slides via their website or the app. 

Application for Education:
With 9Slides teachers could turn their instructional presentations into a video that can be uploaded to their blog or website for students to view at home. This could also be a tool for "flipping the classroom"...delivering instruction online outside the classroom and bringing homework inside the classroom.

Benefits of using 9Slides:
☆ Cloud-based solution
☆ View on most browsers
☆ Password protect available with upgrade
☆ Add video and audio commentary directly from iPad
☆ Import from Microsoft PowerPoint or Adobe presentations from SlideShare, Dropbox, Google, or Box

Pricing Options:

App of the Day: Socrative

What is Socrative?
Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers to engage their classrooms through a series of educational exercises and games via smartphones, laptops, and tablets.

Applications for Education:
Socrative is a great tool for collecting immediate feedback from students via mobile apps or the internet on laptops or tablets. With Socrative teachers gather assessments via short answer, multiple choice and/or true or false questions. Socrative auto-grades multiple choice quizzes. All quizzes can be exported to Excel or viewed online in a Google spreadsheet. One of my favorite features is the exit quiz. Exit quizzes quickly check a student's understanding before the end of class.

Benefits of Using Socrative:
☆ Engages students through the use of technology
☆ Quick response from formative assessments
☆ Exit tickets to check student understanding
☆ Games to track performance while playing
☆ Multiple choice quizzes auto-graded
☆ Quizzes can be exported
☆ Up to 50 students logged in at one time per room
☆ Accessible from multiple devices (iOS/Android app, smartphone, laptop, tablet)

App of the Day: Flashcard [+]

What is Flashcard [+]?
Looking for a new way to study? Flashcard [+] is the answer. Flashcard [+] is a FREE app that allows you to create rich text formatted flashcards and download millions of flashcards on hundreds of subjects created by both experts and novices.

Applications for Education:
Flashcard [+] is a great way to study for exams no matter the subject area. The most unique part of this flashcard app is that you can not only create your own flashcards but import directly from Quizlet. Quizlet has thousands of flashcards. Just type in a key word and the app will search the Quizlet site for you.

Benefits of Using Flashcard [+]:
☆ Create your own cards with rich text formatting and images
☆ Download millions of flashcards made by other users from Quizlet
☆ Organize your cards into folders
☆ Share your decks with friends through iTunes or email
☆ Keep track of your progress for each deck and each card
☆ Manual and Slide show modes
☆ Combine or split decks
☆ Sorting flashcards
☆ New added feature: Text-To-Speech (more than 40 voices)

NOTE: The free version has the same functionality as the full version but is limited to 7 decks with 100 flashcards each. Also available is the Student Version for $.99 (up to 10 decks, up to 500 flashcards per deck) or the Ultimate Edition for $2.99 (unlimited decks and flashcards).

App of the Day: Snapguide

What is Snapguide?
Snapguide is a free iOS app and web service for those that want to create and share step-by-step "how to guides." The service provides easy to understand instructions for a wide array of topics including cooking, gardening, crafts, repairs, do-it-yourself projects, fashion tips, entertaining and more. Snapguide is free on the iPhone and iPad.

Applications for Education:
The purpose of expository writing is to inform, describe, explain, or define the author's subject to the reader.  Snapguide would serve as a creative way to introduce expository writing at the elementary level, especially to describe or explain a subject. Teachers can embed student snapguides on their webpage to showcase student work. 

Benefits of Using Snapguide:
☆ Snapguide if FREE!
☆ Your content is owned by YOU!
☆ In the Snapguide community one can search for other "how-to guides".
☆ Snapguides can be embedded on webpages (not blog sites).