Here I outline some of my favorite Apps for Education.
Modern Methods of Assignment Submission
At my previous position with The Higher Colleges of Technology we had implemented iPads in every first-year course. Faculty learned quickly which apps work well for educational contexts. Here are a few of my favorite apps and tips on how students can use them to submit assignments. File Uploads and Downloads on the iPad
Many people mistakenly feel that an iPad won't allow assignment uploads due to the missing file manager such as is found on laptops and computers. This is not the case, it is just done in a different way.
The traditional way students submit a paper to the professor:
Open email or online class -> Search computer files for assignment -> upload/send to professor
The way to submit a paper to the professor on an iPad:
Open Assignment in iPad app -> Click 'share button' -> Share to cloud/email -> send to professor
Note: The 'Share Button' is usually a square or rectangle with some type of arrow in it:
What you can share to depends on the app. Different apps are integrated with different tools. The more popular ones have many options. Such as in Explain Everything, you can share to YouTube, or to another app on your iPad, such as Evernote, DropBox, Box, and more. So in that case, you create your file in Explain Everything and then export it to your DropBox, and then send the 'share link' from your DropBox for that file to the professor or submit that link to an assignment submission 'text' form in your online course.
Now I will share some of my favorite apps below, and with each discuss ways to use them interactively for education.
Apps
iFiles: this app allows you to connect your iPad to various cloud storage accounts, all at the same time. I have mind connected to Google Drive, One Drive, Box, and DropBox (yes, I really use all of those!). If you only use Google Drive, then the Google Drive app might be the better choice for you, and each of these apps has its own dedicated app. However, if like me you use many, then iFiles is a better choice. It is free, and I have never had an error or bug with it.
Evernote: This is one of my favorite note-taking tools. It is BYOD, including you can log in from your computer or PC. It is integrated with a lot of other apps. In Evernote you can share your notebooks or posts via email. Evernote is also linked to Penultimate, which is a writing/doodling tool on the iPad, and everything your draw or write in Penultimate will be automatically saved to your Evernote account. The new Evernote Jot stylus works very well for this.
Pages, Keynote, Numbers: These are the Apple alternatives to Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Once an assignment is done in each, it can be exported as a Word, PP or Excel file format to submit to the professor. The files can also be exported in other files formats, such as PDF, or ePUB (universal eBook reader file format). The files can be emailed to anyone, or you can choose to 'open in other app', and then send that file to iFiles, Box, DropBox, Evernote, etc. Once the file is in any of those other cloud storage accounts, then it can be shared easily from there as well.
ArtStudio: this is a drawing and art app for the iPad. I really like it as it allows you to have layered-files such as in Adobe Photoshop, which allows manipulation of the graphic on different layers without affecting the other layers. This app works really well with the new Evernote Jot stylus . When you are done with your work, you can export it as a JPEG, PNG, or PSD file format, and can export it to your Photos, email it, or copy it to clipboard (to paste into Pages, Evernote, etc). Once it is in your Photos, then from there you can share to multiple locations and/or people on the web.
MetaMoji Note: This is my favorite mark-up tool on the iPad. Some people really like Neu. Annotate PDF, but, I find it harder to effectively. use and write on. In Note I found it was easier to zoom in and out on spaces, there were more mark-up options and choices, and I felt that my stylus worked better with it. And marked-up files can be sent via email, to the cloud, to photos, to an app, or printed. This is a great tool for editing/marking up student papers.
Explain Everything: This is a very popular educational tool among instructors. The professor can make annotated audio explanations of course topics for students with this, or can use it to make audio comments, feedback, and markups of student work. Items can be imported from Dropbox, Google Drive, WebDAV, Evernote, Box, and many more apps. And the files created can be exported to all these places as well.
There are many other similar interactive whiteboard tools like Explain Everything, such as Doceri (another of my favorites) and ShowMe.
Those are just a few of my favorites, though I have many more and will talk about them in future blog posts.
Effective iPad Methods for Education
A colleague and I collected iPad 'Best Practices' from faculty at HCT that were using iPads in the classroom. Those curriculum plans and pedagogical approaches can be viewed at this link: http://hctilcs.weebly.com/effective-ipad-methods