LOCPix App

The Library of Congress is a wonderful resource for teachers, especially in the Humanities. If you’re looking for a good, quick resource for historical photos, political cartoons, architecture and engineering drawings, and other useful visuals to compliment your history classes, try out the free LOCPix app.

This app puts the collections of the Library of Congress in your hands and in your classroom. Easily searchable, easy to save, easy to print (you can even send postcards with LOC collection prints!), these prints, photos, illustrations, and records will be a great resource for history teachers and students.

Fotopedia Apps

If you are looking for beautiful photos of the most interesting places around the world, either to integrate into a lesson or just because you are experiencing wanderlust, try some of the free apps offered by Fotopedia. Lately I’ve been wandering the streets of Paris with Fotopedia Paris, which comes with one thousand stunning photos from around the City of Light.

Fotopedia apps also include information posts along with each photo, maps to find the location of each photo, trip planners, and collections of photos that tell stories related to a particular theme.

Check out all of the free apps made by Fotopedia in the app store!

Flow App

Flow Free is a great game app for kids who enjoy solving puzzles and are spatial learners. It’s all about finding the right path from one colored dot to its partner without crossing the pipes.

This game might make a great warmup exercise for a class that is about to use a lot of spatial thinking in their coming lesson, or just a fun cool down at the end of class! But beware: it’s slightly addictive and there are extra game packs that can be purchased for $3.99.

Diigo and other bookmarking apps

Keeping track of resources found online can be challenging for students conducting research. Creating a personal learning space is one way to keep resources organized and to make research less stressful. Websites and their iPad apps like Diigo.com can be used to create libraries full of links to articles, pictures, websites, and notes that will help a student keep track of web sources.

Try Diigo or Scoopi.it on the web or on the iPad to create a space to save information, read, annotate, and share! Teachers can use these great tools to gather information for their students in one place – just curate your library of info in advance and send the URL to your students when they need it!

Are you using any other bookingmarking tools on your iPad or online? Let us know in the comments section!

Education Collections in the App Store

Attention teachers! The app store is continually making it easier to find educational apps! Now you can search for apps in the app store by subject, grade level, and app function. Just visit the app store and click on the “Education Collections” heading on the front page to start!

Art Authority for iPad App

Art Authority is a must-have app for any Fine Art or Art History teacher. With more than 50,000 of the world’s greatest works of art available to view on the iPad’s beautiful screen, this app would be a great addition to teacher or student iPads.

Search for works of art, artists, locations, and major art periods. Pinch to zoom in on each work, click for more information, find similar works, and watch slideshows compiled within the app.

One drawback may be that the app uses Wikipedia when you click links for more information on each work, so you’ll have to be sure to check your facts. Overall, however, this app is so full of major works of art, from prehistoric art to contemporary works, and has so many useful tools, that it’s worth the $4.99 it costs.

The iPad in Action, by Joe Thompson

The iPad is, to me, a peripheral, not the heart of your computing experience. That “core” is probably a Windows workstation. You are going to take photos, create documents, etc with the iPad. These need to be backed up somewhere for a bunch of reasons. There is a lot of noise and confusion out there about how best to do this: Dropbox? ICloud? other ways? I do not see a settled, accepted “orthodoxy” for managing backups. I am not impressed with Dropbox but you will hear others who are. Try everything, and while you are looking try this: 1) be sure you have iTunes loaded on your Windows PC. If you don’t have it get it at apple.com/itunes 2) take the usb cable out of the charger that came with your iPad. Plug the iPad end into the iPad like you are going to charge it. Plug the USB end into a free USB port on your PC. 3) open “My Computer” or “Computer” on your Windows PC by double-clicking it. 4) you should see the iPad in the list of stuff available. start clicking on folders til you see the list of photos and stuff. 5) remember you are looking at the stuff that is on the iPad. To back it up copy and paste (right click and choose Copy then paste to say your desktop). Now there is a copy of stuff on your PC. 6) once you have it on the PC get rid of it on the iPad so you have space for photos movies and projects you haven’t made yet! Name your pics so you can find and use them in future. Joe

Paper by 53 App: Review by Joe Thompson

Paper by 53 software is a nice app for note-taking, dreaming, or brainstorming. You essentially have the feel of making notes, drawings, etc. on actual notebooks thanks to the clever and beautiful interface. I recommend starting with the tools provided in the free version (additional pens etc. are provided for $7.99). A talented group of developers who had sold a”digital paper” project to Microsoft only to see it killed kept going and that is why this product feels so polished and perfect. Like other reviewers I think a stylus would be good to use with this tool. Visual learner? Artist? Dreamer? Like to doodle? Get Paper for your iPad.If you’d like to see the app in action, click here.

Molecules App

The Molecules app by Sunset Lake Software is a fun, easy way to teach students about moleclue structures.

This free app comes loaded with simple molecules and you can download other molecules from the RCSB Protein Data Bank or from PubChem, also free. You can spin and zoom into each molecule, and each molecule comes with detailed information about each molecule.

For more information about the app and its developers, please click here.

Cargo-Bot App

If you Cargo-Bot is a fun game that serves as an excellent introduction to the world of computer programming.

Students learn how computers “think” by planning out a series of commands and watching as they are executed. The goal of the game is to make a computer claw grab and drop colored boxes in a particular order. The puzzles range in size and difficulty.

Even if you are not teaching computer programming in your class, this game would be a good way to practice logic skills with your students! This game would be great for middle and high school students.