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How to pick apps for your homeschool?
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How to pick apps for Homeschooling.
There are thousands of apps for the iPad and iPhone. It is easy to get app crazy with all the free or cheap apps. How do you know what app to buy? How do you know if an app is worth the cost? How do you sort through all the thousands of apps to find good apps for homeschooling? Here is what I recommend for finding and choosing good homeschool education apps:
- Search the iTunes Education category. Remember that if you are searching on the iPad it does not sort based on popularity. The iPad defaults to listing the newest app first.
- Read reviews on iTunes and on other web-pages listed below. The iTunes store will have reviews listed by those who have purchased the app. These will be people who purchased the app without a promo code. Many web site reviewers are given free promo codes to review the app. This is OK but sometimes it it good to know that they did not purchase the App.
Here is a list of recommended app review sites with helpful information.
- Moms with Apps – You can sign up for weekly updates about educational apps that are free or at a reduced price on Fridays.
- Apps for homeschooling
- I education Apps Review (IEAR.org)
- smart apps for kids
- Teachers with Apps
Before you buy an expensive app I would recommend you also:
- Try the free or light version of the app. Many apps have a free version that has limited features that you can try out before you buy. Search the Apple store using the word light with the app title.
- Wait for the app to go on sale. Apps frequently go on sale. Several websites list apps for sale. If there is an app you like but you are hesitant to buy because of the price you can try waiting for the app to go on sale. Many apps go on sale around Christmas or around the company’s anniversary.
- Buy a couple of .99 apps to get a feel for the value of apps and how much you are willing to spend on an App that may not live up to your expectations.
- Look at the number of stars. Each app in the iTunes store usually has a rating. Some apps may not have enough reviews to have a rating. This is OK if the app had a recent update but the older version of the app had good rating. Some websites will sort the app list by its star rating and then by category.
- App finding apps:There are also apps you can download that filter out apps. You can try the app Kinder Town to search for good kids apps.
For more helpful advice on picking apps go to moms with apps site and view the article here. I’d love to hear from you about how you find and select good apps for your homeschool. How do you find good apps for homeschooling?
Video for creating an iBook
Its been a few months since Apple announced iBook2 with interactive features but unfortunately there are not very many iBooks with interactive features. I was thrilled to come across the video below because it showed that there are interactive kids iBooks in the bookstore. (You can buy the interactive iBook on insects here.) The video below is an excellent example of how you can use the iBooks authoring tool.
Quick fix for HP Touchpad not charging
While the HP Touchpad was a super good deal when it was $99 there are some issues. One issue I have come across is problems with the micro USB connector. Recently the HP Touchpad stopped charging. It didn’t seem like it could be the cable since it was new. I found one way to get the HP Touchpad to charge. If you put an object like a book under the cable near the connector the HP Touchpad will charge. (see picture above) I usually do this at night so I don’t have to worry about someone moving it. At least there is an option to buy an inductive charger for the Touchpad.
Should homeschoolers buy the new iPad 3
Apple just announced the new iPad. The new iPad 3 has a few new features but is it worth it for homeschooling? The main new features are:
So should you get one for your homeschool? I would say no for the following reasons.
Unless you plan on using the iPad for taking pictures in place of your regular camera you really don’t need a better iPad camera. Sure the iPad 2 camera is not very good but most of the time the kids just use it to take crazy pictures. This can use up a lot of memory even with the low resolution iPad 2 camera.
There may be some instances when the high resolution screen would be nice but it is not a must have. Videos and pictures look fine on the iPad 2.
While Apple will continue to sell the iPad 2, it appears that the iPad 2 will only come in the 16GB capacity model. You should still be able to get a larger capacity refurbished iPad 2 through apples store which still carry the one year warranty. As of this writing you can get a 32GB iPad 2 for $449. More memory was high on my iPad 3 wish list. I have had some problems with using most of the memory on my 16 GB iPad 2 but it’s good to purge apps and pictures every once in a while.
So for now I will stick with the iPad 2. In a year or so there may be something new but for now I am content with the iPad 2.
What iBook 2 means for homeschool curriculum
iBook 2 is Apples latest contribution to the iPad and education. What does that mean for the homeschool community. One of the best things I see is that homeschool books can easily be ported to iBooks 2. {hint please homeschool publishers start making ibooks!}
Here are the highlights of iBooks 2
iBook 2
- textbook for $14.99 or less
- interactive Ebooks
- Quizzes and review questions
- automatic flash cards from highlights
- 3D animations
iBooks Author app
- Easy tool to create ebooks
- It’s free
- Publish right to the store
- highlight text for glossary
- HTML and Java script
- import Keynote presentations
iTunes U
- videos
- assignments
One downside with iBook 2 is that the textbooks take a lot of memory – up to a couple of Gigs. Also it looks like the iBooks publisher app is only for Macs. Overall though there are tremendous possibilities for the homeschool.
Overall this update should provide an improvement in the use of the iPad for homeschooling. Maybe now I will not spend time looking for lost school books.
How to use iOS as a dictionary
One of the nice features of iOS 5 is the define option. If you want to find out the meaning of a word just double touch the word. Press the arrow on the right and a define option is available. This feature seems to be available even without a network connection.
Why I chose the iPad for homeschooling
I chose the iPad for myself our homeschool:
I know that there are many tablets now on the market. When I first saw the iPad I immediately thought about the possibilities of using a tablet for homeschooling. I was a little hesitant to buy the first generation iPad because of the price. I also kept hoping there would be a good Android tablet that was cheaper than the iPad. After a year of waiting for Android, I finally decided to buy a second generation iPad. I have not regretted that decision. With five kids at home, the iPad is a favorite school activity.
Here are my top five reasons i chose iPad for homeschooling
- Large selection of quality apps (I can transfer iPhone apps to the iPad for free)
- Large screen so more than one person can look at it.
- Built with quality and size. No cheap plastic.
- Long Battery life. I usually only charge it one or two nights a week.
- Instant on.
iPad 2 vs. iPad
I bought a second generation iPad (16 GB) because it was the latest and it had a faster processor. In hindsight I think I would have bought a 1st generation iPad with more memory. The iPad 2 does have some nice bonus features but for most of what you need the first generation iPad will work.
Favorite feature: Automatic on with the cover opened. It is so nice to just open the cover and look something up and then close the cover and toss the iPad on the bed.
Least favorite feature: The camera: It is low quality and the kids sometimes take many pictures that take up memory. A close second least favorite feature is the 1 speaker! It isn’t very loud especially in a family with four boys.
Ultimately it now comes down to the software. Even though there are some good Android tablets on the market Apple has a good head start on applications. The applications make the tablet useful. The iPad is still the king of tablets.
What you need to know about iCloud
I have been looking forward to iCloud ever since iOS 5 was announced. To be honest though I have hardly used it since upgrading to iOS 5. Now I am attempting to use iCloud on my iPad. Right now there appear to be some limitations. Here is my take on iCloud for the iPad and iPhone.
The Good:
- 5 GB of free storage
- Find my idevice
- Syncs contact list, calendar, reminders and bookmarks
The Bad:
- You can’t backup PDF documents only iWork docs
- You can only backup
- You cannot manage what is on iCloud
The Ugly:
- You must setup a me.com to sync email
- It’s hard to see your files that are backed up
- It is hard to figure out. I wanted to back up all my Pages documents but it seemed to take too long. I have no idea what documents are in the cloud.
If you are looking for a place to store documents and file in the cloud then iCloud is not what you are looking for. I would recommend Dropbox or evernote. If you just want peace of mind that your contacts and other important data will be backed up in the cloud then iCloud will work for you.
Help me clean my iPads memory!
Help! I ran out of memory on my iPad!
Delete multiple pictures:
My 16Gb iPad is to full to add more content! After looking at my iPad closer, I discovered that one of my wonderful little angles used the camera to take the pictures shown above. They just so happened to be all the same! It was getting tiresome deleting one picture at a time. It seemed like there should be some way to delete multiple pictures at once on the iPad. Well there is a way to delete multiple pictures from the photo library. It’s not intuitive, but when you are viewing your photos, you can select multiple pictures. If you tap on the symbol in the upper right that looks like the symbol for export (highlighted in the picture below) you can select multiple photos.
You can then select a number of pictures and then delete as shown below.
Deleting documents in apps
I also found that I had multiple copies of PDF documents in different PDF reader apps. Some of the apps are easy to remove documents in iTunes but others require you to go into the app and delete the individual PDF documents.
iOS 5 options
One of the nice features of ios 5 is that you can view the memory of each app. You can find this in Settings-> usage. You can delete the apps that use up a lot of memory.
iCloud
Now iCloud can be used to store up to 5GB of data free. This is useful if you have WiFi available. At the very least you can move some apps/documents to iCloud that you do not use very often. I have not found this option to be useful at this point but if you have found it useful I would love to hear about it.