The Amazing Digestive Journey is a nice iOS app for Health/Science teachers wanting to introduce the concept of digestion to students. This interactive app lets students complete activities that start in the mouth while they try to help cure a patient of their ailments. This app focuses on the different aspects of digestion through organs such as: esophagus, stomach, liver etc as well as different enzymes.
Sumdog is an excellent iPad for educational games in Math, Reading, and Writing. Based on the popular website, Sumdog has student's playing against other student's worldwide to build their skills. The only requirement is signing up on their free website to be able to play the games on an iPad.
Gadzookery is a wonderful free iOS app that helps students build their Writing and Vocabulary skills. This can be done by either playing one player or against random opponents where a person tries to create a sentence from a given word. What makes this nice for educators is that the game comes w/ a built in dictionary/thesaurus to help kids create their sentences. Scoring is done by each letter and a person can challenge another person (to eliminate their opponent's score) for misspelled/made up words.
Kindoma Storytime is an interesting iOS app that combines "story time" w/ video chat to allow others to read a digital book together. This is really good when wanting to read a story w/ another who is not around (i.e. child, student, etc). The books can be selected by Reading and then are synced together so when a page is turned it does it on both devices. Another great feature is the ability to point or highlight words so that the other person can see what is going on in real time. For example, it's a great way to access student comprehension by having them point to items in the book.
Door 24 is a fantastic new iPad for Math grades 4th-8th. This app is aligned to Common Core Standards and focuses on basic Math facts, number sense, and logical/algebraic thinking. It uses fun interactive animated problems to help fix Victor Robot's circuits and find out the mystery of Door 24.
Tell About This is an innovative iPad app that has beginning to make some buzz among the social networks (Thanks Naomi). This is a fantastic app for responding or creating a writing prompt. A teacher can use it as a writing prompt for students to tell a story. Best of all, a student can use the app to record their response right into the app. Also, a student/teacher can use it to create their own prompt or even use it for digital storytelling. It can also be used to "flip" a classroom.
Math Tree Vs is a super fun 1-2 player iPad app that focuses on basic Math skills (addition, subtraction, etc etc). This app uses the familiar game style where objects fall from the top of the screen while players try to eliminate them before their opponent to have more objects fall on their side of the screen. With MTV, a player tries to find the correct number that will solve their problem and eliminate it from their screen before the other player. Also, players earn tokens throughout the game to add items to their monkey avatar which helps increase their replay value.
5 Dice: Order of Operations Math game by Justin Holladay just got a major update w/ totally new redesign and now w/ wifi capabilities allows up to 5 players on multiple devices. This is an excellent game for using Order of Operations to solve an equation backwards where the answer is given but not the equation. As w/ all Math File Folder Games, teachers/parents get instant real-time results via a press of an email button that allows for easily assessing students.
Endless Reader is a fun iOS app for beginner readers working on sight words. This interactive app focuses on the most commonly used sight words and schools and helps reinforce them through the use of animations, puzzles, and sentences.
Math vs Undead is a fun educational iOS app that combines what kids love zombie, w/ Math. This is a great game for practicing basic Math skills such as: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and more. Ideally this game is for 3rd - 8th graders and has students trying to stop zombies by solving Math equations.
My Geometric Universe is a cool iOS app for helping students draw geometric shapes. This works by supplying a bunch of drawing tools such as: pencil, ruler, compass, etc etc. Once a shape is created it can then integrated into one of three digital environments: kids room, Middle Ages, or Ancient Egypt.
Phrasalstein is a free iPad app after my own heart. This app designed by Cambridge University Press, is a fantastic app that helps students learn vocabulary and phrases in a fun mid-evil/horror setting. The way this works is a user selects a verb and a preposition and then watch as an animation occurs. Also, there are definitions, examples, and exercises that students can complete to help reinforce their Language Arts skills.
Sentence Reading Magic is a wonderful free iOS app that I just found out about from Edshelf. This is a great app for beginning Readers that helps them build sentences as well as work on their Reading skills. For building sentences a student has to move the words into the correct position and the Reading section has users reading a sentence (2-3 words) and then tapping on a picture to see if they are correct.
World's Worst Pet is an excellent free iPad app for vocabulary. This common core aligned app lets students play through 4 different games to learn over a 1000 words. This is done through a variety of activities such as: word context, word sort, synonyms and antonyms. Finally, there is a nice section on writing prompts which is ideal for educators looking to spark students creativity in writing.
The Human Body is a free (this week only) iOS app that is perfect for teaching students about the human body. This app is completely interactive and covers such items as the: heart, lungs, eyes, skin, etc. Also, there is an innovative record tool which allows students and parents/educators to record their conversations while they interact w/ this app.
Chima is a fun iOS app for wanting to reinforce students basic Math skills such as addition/subtraction. It's a fairly simple game where a user tries to answer a multiple choice Math question correct. It uses a basic fighting/adventure/RPG style game where a correct answer attacks/hits the enemy causing them to lose hit points (HP). The better a person does and they can level up. There's also a nice feature to choose the monster you want to go against.
Animoby is an excellent iPad app that I just found out about from Edshelf. This is a great app to create stunning presentations by simply tapping on the screen and using one of the many tools such as: draw, paint, type, images, etc. Also, a user can add a narration by recording their voice and then share their project via email.
