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I don't allow gaming during instructional time in my Library Media Center. To curb this, I allow students to use the Scrabble app as a educational gaming tool for use during the student's 'down time'. At first the students groan and complain but eventually they do enjoy the app and the challenge of identifying words that can be used to win the game with a partner.

Try this: log onto this app, connect is to a projector and play one of the games with a group of 16 years....talk about fun. I used this app with my beginning Spanish classes at the beginning of the year to reinforce sight words taught in class. The students really enjoy this game, the competition, the stop clock and the whole group fun. Just try this app, you'll be hooked.

The Math teacher at my school has influenced a new group of students who love chess. The students have been so excited about playing chess that they requested a app be loaded onto the Library ipads. The Master Soft Chess app is a wonderful addition. It provides hints, history and overall is a good chess app to help support chess matches.

We have all the Everyday Math apps, and they are the same games kids are familiar with in the math instruction. This is the favorite. Our kids enjoy these apps when given free choice time on the iPad, so you know it must be fun. For Baseball Multiplication, to get a hit you must answer a math question correctly. An incorrect answer - strike one! Kids need practice with multiplication tables. Lots of practice. This app is an easy way to offer that!

I forgot to mention that it's $1.99 but they offer Everyday Math apps free from time to time.

Disney offers this book app for free and it is a great example of the many features that can be found in an ebook. You can select young reader mode, read to me mode, or record your voice to listen to (great for fluency practice). The best feature of having it read it to you is that it plays your voice over the music which makes it sound very official. There are a few coloring pages and games that students can also look at. Very fun and a big hit with my youngest iPad users (preschool and kindergarten).

Voicethread for the iPad just arrived, and it's amazing! It allows students to create narrated slideshows. It also has many many options for hosting open discussions of media where invididuals "comment" in various formats (e.g. written, voice, video). Voicethread can upload a broad range of audio and visual format. The voicethread app is free. Free accounts allow for up to the "voicethreads" per user. I paid $60.00 this year to obtain a one-year classroom account with 50 student accounts which I can manage and supervise very efficiently.

The VoiceThread app has exciting possibilities for students to present their research in a new way. My students used a combination of text slides created in Doodle Buddy and screen shots of images to create slide shows. They did voiceovers on top of the slide show and could even draw on the screen to point out the part of the diagram that they were referring to. One other exciting game-changer is that students can listen to another student's voicethread on their own ipad and then respond to it in text or record their own response. Then the student presenting (and teacher) can read and listen to the feedback. Some of these features are limited on the free version, like only 5 voice threads per account. There is more teacher control on the paid version as well. I'm definitely considering buying the full version.