A great way for students to use the itouches in the library is use of the NASA application. My students each chose a planet to do a slideshow for. They conducted research on computers and could have used the NASA application for additional information.
Another cool application is the United States Geography by Discovery Education. My students are asked to compare and contrast different places in the U.S. (we, as a class, analyzed Alaska and Arizona, and each students did a Venn Diagram on the kidspiration program). This application could help students (most of mine have lived in Texas all their life) understand different types of geographical features.
There is a really cool application titled 101 + 10 new science experiments. It cost 3.99 so I did not download it but the demo lists a few of these experiments and they give one example of a detailed science experiment.
There are many different applications for students acquiring a new language (whether it be English, Spanish, French, American Sign Language, etc. This might be helpful in the bilingual classes as well as for ESL students (for that matter, any student could benefit from improved language and grammar skills).
Art Lite is a great art application for those interested in seeing great works of art (for are differentiated learners who love to use artistic skills to demonstrate understanding, this would be a fun app. explore. I would be careful with this one as some art can be suggestive of adult themes.
There are so many great apps. that they are too numerous to list. I think this is a great tool for differentiated learning and I am envious to today's students that have so much more information available to them than when I was their age.
There are so many apps that could be used for our kids. The only issue I'm finding is making sure they are free and that the kids don't delete them from the ipod. It is a real process to synch all of ours and make sure they stay that way.
ReplyDeleteI am sure free is a must because even a two dollar app would be quite expensive if placed on every itouch. I also find it a challenge to make sure the material is age appropriate (ex. not high school material or designed for pre-k students in the case of my class). As you have said, there is so much technology that the challenge is to find the best of the lot since it is impossible to use it all.
ReplyDeleteWhen purchasing an app for the itouch, the librarian can purchase it from the computer that does the synching and then add it to all the itouches through the synching process thus paying for the app only 1 time. I have done this a couple of time with the itouches at my library and it works quite well. I don't have a credit card linked to the library's itune account, it is a gift card that I purchased with some library budget money. The problem about the students deleting the app would be an issue but each time the machines go through the synching process the programs can be placed back on there.
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