Ipad Apps!!!!

Tonight exploring the different iPad apps only increases my desire to have one in my classroom and makes my love for Apple as a company increase. I love the level of creativity and incorporation of different subjects and standards it allows.

One of the first apps I looked at was History tools. I find history fascinating and considering how much its implications have on literature, having a good knowledge and context contributes to better teaching of a particular short story, novel, or play. History tools works through pulling up the current date and it lists several interesting facts in history about that specific day. So for instance it lists the summary first, then a born today, died today, today's events, feast day, holidays, and my events sections. You can choose to add an event or choose a different date. I really love this app because it would allow for students to see the relevance every day they live has in life. Also, it would provide a history teacher a creative bell ringer assignment for beginning of class work by assigning students a writing prompt from it each day. Overall, I think that this would be useful to create relevance and also to allow students to look up certain events or create events for a project allowing them to see they take part in history making.

A second app that I have to write about even though I spoke about it earlier is the Shakespeare app. I just cannot express how much I would use this in my classroom. Every student in public education reads at least one Shakespeare play a year if not more. Curriculums are based around units in drama and Shakespeare remains the most famous playwright to ever live. This app would provide students not only the text of every Shakespeare play which is hard to find anthologies for classroom texts for decent price, but it also provides students tools to help navigate the world of Shakespeare. They can use the portraits to see pictures relating to Shakespeare himself or specific plays. A glossary is also provided that allows them to grasp some of the more archaic words used by Shakespeare to portray a certain mood or scene or rhyming scheme. They can search for quotes to use in a paper perhaps or use a concordance to find exactly what they need. There is just every tool you could think to need as a teacher teaching a unit on Shakespearian drama and text.

The last app that I looked at was the dictionary app. How this app works is through bringing up a home page that allows you to search for a word's definition in the dictionary provided. It also has features such as a word of the day. For example, today's word was requisition. This app defines the word gives the part of speech and gives a thesaurus and phonetical pronunciation. Also, this app provides a Spanish translation as well. This tool would be especially useful in a language arts or foreign language course or for ESL learners. I like this app because too often when teaching writing and grading writing (in my experience at Johnson as TA) students have a very limited and weak vocabulary. So providing them a dictionary that engages them to use it to better their writing and understand the proper use of a certain word excites me! I also like the word of the day feature in a language arts classroom because it constantly exposes students to new words and expands their vocabulary. This will also help with standardized test like the SAT that test verbal capabilities.

Overall, the iPad ceases to amaze me as far as its capabilities to engage students and provide them with hands on, instant tools that were never provided to me when I was a student. I cannot imagine the amount of information I would have retained through the exposure to something educational and fun at the same time. There are just thousands of possibilities!