From initial charges that ‘it;s just an overgrown iPhone’ the iPad is now part of many teachers’ and schools’ essential kit.
But it’s fair to say that while Apple has created a beautiful, robust and powerful piece of kit finding the best apps on the App Store can be a challenging experience.
So I asked everyone on Twitter for some advice on what th best apps were out there, and @narthernlad came back with so many suggestions I’m going to split them over a couple of posts!
Here are some suggestions for literacy apps to try with your students. If you have any other suggestions for a great iPad literacy app, I’d love to hear them. Just add them in the comments below.
1) First Letters – Match the letters and listen to the song. Teaches the youngest children phonics
2) ABC Alphabet Phonics – A simple game where children locate the correct letter
3) Story Ideas – Can you guess what this one does? A slick new app.
4) Comic Touch – Make your photos go all cartoony warping images and adding speech bubbles
5) Toontastic - A great little app that allows children to create characters, settings and their own cartoons
6) Chicktionary - As the blurb says ‘Unscramble a roost of letters and create as many words as possible’.
7) Puppetpals HD - Create your own puppet shows with animation and audio in real time
8) Hangman - An oldie, but a goodie!
9) Word Search Kids – Again, no prizes for originality here, but still lots of fun
10) StoryKit - Create your own electronic storybook
11) Adventure Books – Trying to encourage your boys to read? Who could resist an exciting adventure?
12) Storyrobe - Create and share digital stories
13) Verses – Poetry, Poems and Poets – Fridge magnets with a 21st century twist!
14) Sparklefish - Another iPad version of an old favourite, complete a story in turns then see what you get.
15) Sock Puppets – Create and share your own lip synced videos
16) Alphabet Tracing – A fun series of animations to help children learn to form letters
17) Pocketphonics - A highly rated phonics app that covers letter sounds, letter writing and first words
18) Bluster - A vocabulary building game from McGraw-Hill
19) Learn to Spell – Reception – A nice looking app that does exactly what it says on the tin
20) Sentence Builder – Designed to help young children build gramatically correct sentences
Scribble Press for iPad has gotten great reviews from teachers, and its a free complete suite of tools for creating ebooks. You can also order printed copies of the books directly from the App. Currently listed in “Staff Favorites” in the App store, this App launched just one month ago. Please try it and add to this list!
This is an absolutely fantastic list. I’m going to have to give some of these a go. Thanks for this!
Another great app for teachers is FluencyFinder. It is for the iphone/ipad and allows you to quickly assess a student’s word per minute reading fluency. FluencyFinder is awesome because it replaces the paper/pencil/stopwatch assessment with technology. You can focus on the student and not the process. FluencyFinder works for me!
Passed by your post and decided to share it on my blog so my followers can see it too. I used the same title, “20 Great iPad Apps for Primary Literacy The Creative Education Blog”