My Favorite Apps
Trading Cards - Free
Trading Cards is an app from ReadWriteThink. Students can create cards for the following: real person, fictional person, real place, fictional place, vocabulary word, event, or object. The feature I like the most, however, is the higher level guiding questions used to fill out the various parts of the card. Users can also add a image and choose from several different design templates. See samples by clicking on the iPad Sample Products tab at the top of the page.
Show of Hands - Free
Show of Hands is an anonymous polling app. Questions range for politics to sports to parenting to current events. As a former social studies teacher, I can see so many uses for this app in the classroom. It would be great for current events or as a warm up or engage activity. In addition, ELA teachers could use some of the questions and results as writing prompts. The app also provides graphs and charts with results from every state and users are able to sort by various demographic data. This provides an opportunity for interdisciplinary lessons with math.
Zapd - Free
Zapd is an app for creating websites. It is very easy to use and could be integrated into just about any subject. Students get so excited when they see their work on the web. See a sample by clicking on the iPad Sample Products tab at the top of this page.
Creative Book Builder - $3.99
Creative Book Builder is an app for creating ebooks/epubs. It is so exciting for students to see their work in iBooks. There are easier apps to use, but the end result is certainly worth it!