Tag Archives: iPad education apps

Price Drops: All of Spinlight’s Educational iPad Games on Sale for 99 Cents This Week

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End-of-SchoolMegaSale

Spinlight’s End-of School Mega Sale has all of their educational games for iPad and iPhone on sale for just 99 cents.

I posted just a few days ago about the excellent Geography Drive USA app that’s a part of this sale. Spinlight makes a number of other popular and award-winning iPad apps for kids from ages 1-12+. And now they’ve got all of these on sale at 99 cents, down up to 75% on some of the titles.

In addition to marking the approaching end of the school year, Spinlight has another admirable reason for running this sale:

… And second, we’re doing it for a reason. We want to make great apps for kids — and to make them insanely affordable for kids, parents and schools. But to do that, we have to see the volume it takes to be profitable at a lower price point. So we’re conducting a big experiment to see how low we can go. And we’re inviting you along for the ride.

I’d say that’s a heck of a win-win situation for parents and teachers – the opportunity to grab up some excellent educational iPad games at bargain prices and a t the same time give some support to a publisher that’s focused on producing these sort of apps.

The sale runs until May 12 and you can check out all the apps and bargains at the Spinlight home page.

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Featured in the iPad App Store this Week: Apps for Elementary Schools

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iPad Apps for Elementary School

This week the Featured section of the iPad App Store is full of even more highlighted app collections than usual. One of the notable app collections that caught my eye is ‘Apps for Elementary School’ – as I have a daughter in 4th grade.

The collection covers a lot of ground. It includes around 275 apps divided into these main sections: Math, Literacy, Science, Social Studies, Art & Music, and Health & Fitness.

Each of those main sections has useful sub-sections to make it easier for specific apps that you or your elementary school age kids may be interested in. For example, the Math section has sub-sections for Measurement & Data, Shapes & Spatial Reasoning, The Number System, Drill & Practice, Beyond Drill – Strategy, and Beyond Drill – Brain Busters; and the Social Studies section has sub-sections for World Cultures, Geography, and History & Historical Figures.

I’ve spent a good amount of time browsing the collection and I’m still far from done – but I’ve already seen some of my daughter’s favorites and quite a few promising apps we need to try out.

You can find the Apps for Elementary School collection in the top rotating panel of the Featured tab in the iPad App Store.

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10 Great iPad Apps for Students on the Autism Spectrum

by on in iPad in Education

Proloquo2Go iPad app

I’m continually impressed and amazed at how much impact the iPad is having in education – and especially in helping students with autism or on the autism spectrum. So I’m delighted to share this guest post today, covering 10 great iPad apps (and one great iPad case) for Students on the Autism Spectrum.

This post was written by Cathy Hoesterey. Here’s a little background on Cathy and her qualifications to write on this subject:

Cathy Hoesterey is an assistive technology specialist and occupational therapist living in Bellevue, WA near Seattle. She works for Belllevue School District in the special education department providing technology for special needs students ages 3-21 years old.

Cathy presents at national conferences and gives webinars on iPads and other assistive technologies. Her blog iPad for All is designed to support iPad users of all ages and abilities, as well as educators, therapists and families. She finds the overwhelmingly positive response of her students to the iPad energizing and rewarding.

As an assistive technology specialist working with special needs students for many years now, I’ve seen a lot of technology come and go. However, I have never seen a device so engaging and versatile as the iPad. In the past it was not uncommon for a student to abandon an expensive communication device because it was too complex to use, heavy and often unattractive. The iPad has a certain cool factor with students and their peers that cannot be underestimated. Teachers and family members are also more willing to use it.

ABC News recently reported that a government survey of parents says 1 in 50 U.S. schoolchildren has autism. The definition of autism has expanded to include less severe and related conditions such as Asperger Syndrome. I work with dozens of students who have significant communication needs, the majority of them with autism. The apps that follow are some of those that we most frequently use with students on the autism spectrum. Of course, every student’s needs are unique so we do customize the iPad or other device to meet their particular needs.

[click to continue reading…]

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iPad in Education: Doodlecast Pro: For "Flipping" the Classroom

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DoodleCast Pro for iPad

Doodlecast Pro is a simple, effective, and fun-to-use screen-drawing tool and voice recorder that has multiple uses in a classroom setting.  There are a few teachers in my building that utilize iPads for instruction (sadly we are not yet a 1:1 school), and I’ve already passed along the suggestion to them when I saw that it is currently on sale.  I work as an administrator at the high school level, and the applications for this app in my setting are wide-ranging.  For anyone that wants to “flip” a lesson, or even provide an online version of a review for an assessment, this app would work nicely.

Within a very short time after downloading, I had connected my both my YouTube and Dropbox accounts, and I was ready to begin recording.  There are multiple pen sizes, colors and opacity settings that can be changed on the fly during recording, or you can pause to change settings.  There are several background options to choose from, including graphing & lined paper options for note taking or showing graphing examples for math.  During my test, I preferred the dark background, utilizing bright pen colors a’la the Khan Academy videos. 

The interface is clean and easy to navigate.  In their recent update, they’ve included what they call a “flub” feature, which allows you to rewind up to 18.5 seconds of your recording to fix any mistakes or… flubs.  Aptly named, and a great addition to the app.

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iPad Education Apps: Leo’s Pad 2

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Leo' Pad iPad app

Leo’s Pad 2 is a great looking educational app for the iPad aimed at pre-schoolers and early learners. I only heard of it because the app’s publishers, Kidaptive, followed me on Twitter and I decided to have a look at who they are and that piqued my interest right away.

Reading things like this about their background got me interested:

Kidaptive is an innovative media and technology company dedicated to smart storytelling on iPads and a curriculum developed in collaboration with Stanford University researchers to create entertaining and adaptive content that helps children learn.

Our interdisciplinary team includes experts in learning sciences, animation, writing, game design, film and television production, music, and software development.

Then I watched a video demo of Leo’s Pad and I was even more impressed. Although the voiceover for it is little jargon-heavy for me, I think the animation looks superb and the app looks very engaging for young learners.

[click to continue reading…]

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Review: Robots for iPad, Hurray Robots!

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Robots for iPad is a new iPad app that promises to help us ‘Discover the amazing world of robots with this fun and engaging app’. I’m happy to say the app does a great job at delivering on that promise. It offers a fascinating look at how robots have become reality and are already enhancing [...]

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Super School – a Great iPad App, But Not for Any of the Usual Reasons

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Super School is a new app for the iPad, that’s inspired by the award-winning documentary ‘Waiting for Superman’ – that focused on the crisis in American education. The Waiting for Superman project site outlines its mission as follows: Fixing America’s public education system won’t be easy — but together, it’s possible. The Waiting for “Superman” [...]

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