International School of Central Switzerland's List: iPad for Primary Students

As I started a go-to list of the best educational iPad apps for kids, the list got so long, I split up my posts into categories. So, today we’ll start with my favorite iPad apps for literacy — reading and writing for toddlers, preschoolers, and elementary-age kids. Also, I’ve included special needs iPad app resources at the end of this post.

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The Palm Beach School System has an incredible wiki where members of the community share their favorite apps for specific disciplines. Below I've embedded their list for the top middle school apps but they also have a curated list of apps for middle school and high school.Language Arts:

apps middle school ipad

Bring the classroom to life with interactive mobile
presentations that teachers create and
customize themselves.
And it’s free.

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visual figure – ground apps requiring users to find hidden objects among others in pictures or backgrounds with competing visual information. Some students enjoy these apps and then there are those that stay away from them due to challenges with attention or visual perceptual challenges causing difficulty visually locating items in situations where there is a lot of visual information. Having available activities or pictures that are graded from easy to hard is important to provide to those that struggle so they can find success and work on strategies and skills to develop those skills.

figure ground apps visual iPad OT

"One of the questions the teachers frequently asked was about push notifications. When opening a new app for the first time, you are sometimes asked if you want to allow the app to send you push notifications. So I thought I’d spend a little time here explaining the iPad’s Push Notification feature"

ipad tutorial push notifications

I don’t want the iPads to just change the way we do things in my classroom.  I want them to be transformative.  That is, I don’t want to use the iPads to just do things we could have done on paper.  An app should not just be a glorified worksheet. I want them to allow us to connect and to work and learn differently.  I hope that will happen more and more as time goes on.

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recommendations on perceptual apps

app iPad perception visual color shape pattern

How to play drums on iPad in GarageBand

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If you’ve ever made a video in iMovie, a song in Garageband, a book in Book Creator, (or made anything really) on an iPad, than you know the pain of getting that product off of the iPad. That’s why I’ve made this video (below) to teach you how to pull files off of the iPad, and how to put it back on to the iPad, in less than 5 minutes. I’ve started to teach students how to do this, so that as a teacher I’m not stuck for hours each week managing these devices.

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Bubble in Paradise™ ($0.99) by Clickgamer.com is a must-have for the word game fan.

word game ipad language spelling

We’ve covered configuring an old iPad for a child in print and podcast form. To make sure we’ve touched every base, we round out our look at the kid-safe iPad with this week’s Macworld Video.

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Browse apps by age range, device type and subject area

apps teaching android ipad

The app features an interactive periodic table and a game that you can play afterward to help you recall what you're learned. The best part about this free app is that it features the two-hour NOVA program on elements, so you can watch the episode, then delve deeper afterward.

free app nova elements

here are six helpful tips to improve the typing and writing experience on the iPad:

typing ipad

The app breaks apart words and encourages your child to put the letters in place to form the correct word – encouraging her to learn and recognize words with the help of hints and assistance.

app words education Dulch reading iPad English

39 sites for using iPads in the Classroom

ipads classroom links

here is a list of apps that allow you to tap into the positive benefits of Video Conferencing and connecting to the world outside your classroom.

apps education conferencing ipad

Do you want to use more than one iPod, iPad, or iPhone with the same computer? You can! In fact there are a few ways you can do it.

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Wonders of the Universe is an incredible feat. It’s an iPad app that packs in a custom 3D rendering engine, tons of video, text and image content from Professor Brian Cox’s Wonders series and a brand new interface that works like nothing else you’ve seen from an ‘interactive book’ before.

universe ipad science app

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