by It’s back to school time, and while students are stocking up on notebooks, pencils, and other essentials, teachers are busy planning their year and setting up their classroom.
But there’s one more important preparation teachers should undertake, and that is a visit to the App Store.
Loads of apps specifically designed for teachers can make their school year run a lot more smoothly. Here are our six of our favourite free ones, all available for iPad and iPhone.
Common Core Standards
Available here
With the Common Core such an essential part of today’s education, it’s convenient to have the Common Core State Standards in the palm of your hand. It offers quick access for teachers to easily read and understand the core standards, with an efficient search function that find standards by subject, grade, and subject category (domain/cluster). It includes Math standards K-12 and Language Arts standards K-12. The math standards include both traditional and integrated pathways and the Language Arts standards is tied with Corresponding College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRs).
Scholastic Storia
Available here
Developed by famed publishers Scholastic, Storia is a teacher-recommended eReading app that combines exciting digital experience which engages students to become more confident readers while helping to build reading comprehension and vocabulary skills. The app includes five free eBooks, then in-app purchases. Features include a Storia Dictionary in each eBook, which instantly offers age-appropriate definitions (with an optional natural-voice read-aloud), Read-to-Me eBooks with reading aloud combined with music, sound effects, and highlighted text, Learning Activities to engage the student, and a Reading Report function to follow along and track their reading habits.
Grammaropolis
Available here
One of the best free educational apps out there (with some awards to boot), Grammaropolis uses the parts of speech as animated characters whose personalities are based on the roles they play in the sentence. Including songs, books, videos, and quizzes, it makes grammar fun–really! Though nouns are free in this app, other parts of speech (verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, et cetera) are in-app purchases. It is designed to address different learning styles, by helping students visualize and internalize the roles of the parts of speech and to identify how a sentence is put together.
Edmodo
Available here
Edmodo makes a teacher’s daily life easy and simple. It provides a way for teachers to collaborate, teach, and engage their students in a safe, effective, and easy way. With the app, teachers can create secure classroom discussions, post assignments, track grades and marks, share files, and more! There is also a built-in classroom feed, student progress trackers, library, and more. It brings lessons available to students who might be away, creates an interactive place to be used in class, and is a simple-to-use tool that both teachers and students love.
Educreations Interactive Whiteboard
Available here
Educreations turns your iPad into a recordable whiteboard. Integrating voice recording, realistic digital ink, photos and text, and simple sharing through email, Facebook or Twitter, teachers can help students in a vairety of ways. Teachers can also put lessons right on the web so their students can watch them before class or follow-up after class. Because you can choose who views your lessons, you can also use it for your own personal use or share with fellow teachers, instead. Sharing is easy via email, Facebook and Twitter, and if you have a website for your classroom, lessons can be attached to your site with just a few clicks.
Blackboard Mobile Learn
Available here
Blackboard Mobile Learn™ makes it easy for teachers to access their courses whenever they want. In order for the app to be free, your school does need a licence, but otherwise, it is just $1.99 per year. Blackboard Mobile Learn lets teachers check grades, create discussions, post in discussions, attach files (via Dropbox), read and post announcements, create and comment on blogs and journal entries, and more! They can even set up tests for students to take in the app.
