The first time an iPad falls into your hands, you are amazed by its touch screen, its navigation and the vivid colors of its books and magazines. In fact, the iPad is often thought of as a stylish tablet for consuming digital information, rather than a means of editing and producing content.
However, as you discover its wonderful applications, you see that it allows you to generate a powerful workflow to keep information organized, build academic material and express ideas in a creative way.
To make it easy for you to choose from thousands of apps, I’ve created mind maps that focus on the best apps teachers and students can use to improve their productivity, organization, creative thinking, and content creation. Many of them are free and the rest are really worth the investment.
1. Applications for classroom management and organization
In this category, Wunderlist stands out as an effective task and reminder manager and the three Apps TeacherPal , ClassTime Schedule and Bento to manage information related to students.
2. Applications to take and classify notes
In this category, NoteShelf stands out to write notes with your finger or digital pen, iAWriter especially for typing long writings, GoodReader to stop printing pdf documents and read them anywhere and finally Evernote to classify notes, photos, pdfs and web pages.
3. Media Applications
In this category , Pages , Numbers and Keynote stand out as the replacement for the Microsoft suite to create the most beautiful documents, graphics and presentations. Splice can also help if you often make video montages or Caster Free if you’re a fan of podcasts.
4. Apps for Brainstorming
In this category, Popplet and Idea Sketch stand out for making simple mind maps and diagrams, iThoughts HD for creating more complex analyzes (eg SWOT ), iDraft for outlining ideas and drawings, Corkulous for visualizing ideas (eg design thinking ).
5. Apps to Create Khan Academy-Style Videos, Surveys, Books, and Tutorials
In this category, the newcomer to the iPad from the well-known Animoto stands out , Educreations to create Khan Academy-style presentations with extreme ease, Book Creator to create beautiful iBooks and eClicker for class surveys.
6. Applications for reading
In this category, 24symbols stands out as a Spanish company that presents a Spotify-style book subscription model, Kindle to read all Amazon digital books from iPad, Zinio to find subscriptions to educational magazines, iBooks to personalize your library of books and pdf documents , Wikipanion to consult Wikipedia and the recently launched 42Class , which should allow the reading of digital textbooks from Spanish publishers.
7. Apps to edit photos
The iPad is truly wonderful for capturing screenshots and photos while browsing, editing them, and playing with hundreds of filters. The selection is huge but some of my favorites are Skitch purchased by Evernote , Snapseed , Pixlr-o-matic , PS Express for Adobe PhotoShop lovers and Color Effects to change the color of an object in a photo.
8. Applications for the creation and consumption of online information
This category highlights the Apps that you normally visit first thing in the morning to catch up on current events and your PLN. Flipboard was created for the iPad and like Feedly , it allows you to integrate your Facebook, your favorite blogs, your Twitter, follow a #hashtag, search for information, etc. as a magazine. Instapaper is another essential to read any news offline or without advertising, Blogsy irreplaceable if you want to make an entry on your blog from the iPad and EduTecher to surprise you with a new web tool.
