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If you're on the prowl for great math apps (or any app), crawl over to App crawler - a site that has a lot of apps and ideas for you. There are some very interesting apps here. It is about time, however, for apps to come packaged with textbooks.

My students love the Dragon Dictation app. It is free. Learn to talk into the app and you can dictate papers and more. They were so excited when I taught them how to use this app. It is a must share because students who are more verbal often prefer to dictate papers rather than type them. When I demo this app, first I open it and dictate things - saying funny things about the class and they see the words. Then, I dictate again but start saying "period" "comma" and "new paragraph" so they see how it can add those things to the text. I always end by saying "And ____ ran out of the room today screaming quote I'm afraid of zombies exclamation point end quote." Then I stop and they see how all of the punctuation works. This is a great app and an important one for all tablet and smartphone users.

For those of you already developing educational apps, this might be a great way to win some money for your school (or yourself) and a Sony Tablet. Here's the information: "On July 13 Sony and Adobe launched the Adobe AIR App Challenge, Sponsored by Sony. The goal is to get developers to create quality Android apps using Adobe Flash tools and optimize their apps for the new Sony S1 and S2 Tablets with AIR 3.0. We'd like to get your help to promote this in any relevant campaign activities. More details and entry forms are on the contest website: www.airappchallenge.com . In addition to cash prizes (up to $130,000 for the Grand Prize winner!), 10 finalists can also win an a trip to MAX to showcase their apps and all winners will get 'premium promotion' on the new Sony devices."

If you're looking for apps, here is another review site from a dad who wants to find "the best educational apps for his kids." I like that it has the ages. My biggest issue is that we need to start asking what kind of feedback can be given to parents and teachers out of these apps so we can reinforce out-of-app learning on the topic. Apps and teachers and parents should be partners in learning.

If you're not already using Dropbox - you should. They had a developer conference and will likely end up everywhere in every app. Some very cool things coming. Just like Evernote - who has a powerful "trunk" features where developer work is showcased - Dropbox is going to find that opening up to development opens a whole new marketplace and ingenuity beyond what they have in house.  Some info from the wired article.  "But after all that single-mindedness, Houston and Ferdowsi now want to let their baby sing. Today, at Dropbox's first-ever developers conference, the company is officially launching a new set of coding tools designed to push Dropbox into every corner of your digital life. Not content to stay sequestered inside the box, the company's co-founders are unveiling ways for developers to meld their service with every app on every device you own. For the first five or so years of its existence, Dropbox was synonymous with its "magic folder." Save your files in the Dropbox folder on your computer, and they "magically" reappear in your Dropbox apps on your phone and tablet and in your Dropbox account on the web. Now, if developers take to the company's new tools, the service will escape the confines of this folder, fusing with third-party apps running on practically every computer and smartphone operating system. Houston wants Dropbox to become the "spiritual successor to the hard drive." He says the hard drive needs to be replaced because so many of us are doing so much computing on devices that don't fit the traditional paradigm for working with files. Users don't interact with files on iOS, Android, or the web the way they do on PCs. Apps don't have "open" or "save" options that launch a separate window where you tap through a folder tree."

This is a great simple Apple device app to help you reach an appropriate level of volume in your classroom. Watch the gauge rise and the background change as the volume increases. You can adjust the sensitivity for the situation/activity. The app is supported by ads, but these only appear as you start the app. Download the app at https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/too-noisy/id499844023 http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Classroom+Management+%26+Rewards

An excellent list of airplay enabled apps - although this was out a bit before the current Apple TV, I'm finding that these are some of the highest rated apps on the store with some very cool video capabilities. For example, the free ShowMe app combs your networks and serves up video that your friends are watching -- not to your ipad (although that is possible) but to your TV that is enabled with the Apple TV. I'm finding the Apple TV higher quality than my Roku box, although I'm keeping my Roku box because it has Amazon and my Apple TV does not. If you get an Apple TV, make sure you set up Remote and download some of these apps.

Lots of talk in technology circles about 6th grader Thomas Suarez an iphone programmer.His best selling app is Bustin Jieber a Justin Beiber "Whack a Mole." He shares how he learned how to program an app. How he taught himself the iPhone Software Development kit.  He started an "app club" at school where any kid at school can come and learn how to design an app. He is part of an ipad pilot program. The students are asking teachers to help them design apps for education and the money is going into local education foundation. 

"As the development of apps has evolved, including the platforms they operate on, the ability to ease the organisational challenges in life have become more refined. Whilst the apps featured in this article come at a premium, the features that they display make organising busy lives less complex, with clever design, features and functionality that will keep you ready for the daily trials of being a busy teacher. The apps mentioned in this article are mainly built for Apple devices (iPhone / iPad / Mac), with links directing to the relevant App Stores, unless otherwise indicated."

If you have a wordpress blog, this app - Poster - is an app that many seem to love for wordpress. Worth a download if you're on wordpress. (I use blogpress because it is compatible with blogger but this app looks more feature rich than blogpress.) I am thinking this would work with edublogs - it is worth a try for those of you blogging in a 1:1 ipad environment.

Swift Playgrounds, an innovative new iPad app from Apple that makes learning to code easy and fun for everyone, is now available on the App Store. With Swift Playgrounds, real coding concepts are brought to life with an interactive interface that allows students and beginners to explore working with Swift, the easy-to-learn programming language from Apple used by professional developers to create world-class apps.

Ah, epaper. Digital books. They started as barely a blip but now have become the battleground for the next all out war between tech giants. "The app update -- which Apple is calling iBooks 2 and is already released to the iOS App Store -- will allow for textbooks to be sold through the popular app, which in the past sold novels, nonfiction and poetry, but not textbooks. All textbooks sold through the free app, which is available only to Apple's i-devices, will be priced at $14.99 or less -- a stark contrast to the high-priced paper books that fill college bookstores. But the main allure might not be the price as much as the interactive features iBooks textbooks can offer. Apple, which announced the iBooks update at a press event in New York at the Guggenheim Museum, said the iBooks textbook exceeds paper texts in terms of engagement, calling it a durable, quickly searchable book that offers easy highlighting and note-taking  as well as interactive photo galleries, videos, and 3-D models and diagrams.

One area where the iPad and other tablets have lagged behind is with web apps. While Safari on the iPad is a modern, quite capable browser, many web apps are difficult to use with fingers, and can run very slow on slower processors. Over the past year, though, more and more web apps have been designed or updated to take advantage of the iPad's features, including multitouch, gestures, and mor

There are some new apps in Chrome. I've installed the "pocket" app. These are basically apps that stand alone but sort of have chrome running in the background. Here's information on these handy tools to help you get more done. I do recommend Pocket (and have the app for my ipad as well) for offline reading. There are times I find a great article that I know I want to read, when I click "add to pocket" it puts it into pocket and then, when I sit down to read at night, there's the personal magazine assembled from the day's interests.

This cool website will use your website and turn it into an app on Apple and Android. This is cool and may be a nice answer for teachers who have a website but don't have a full LMS with an app.

This ipad app gives you 100 idea prompts to great your children thinking and writing. Download the app at https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/things-to-think-about/id664670576?mt=8 http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English

Wise words about the purpose of tablets, ipads, and more from Daniel Edwards @syde06 from the UK. It is about people, pedagogy, and purpose... the apps come later. "The power of learning with new technology lies with the teacher and the ability to choose the appropriate tool for the right intention. Moreover, success directly relates to the relationships between learner and educator, and the learner and learning."

Swift Playground is an iPad app to learn Apple's Swift coding language which underpins apps on iOS. The app has engaging lessons and different levels to play.

A truly amazing Apple App for learning maths. Download the host or client app to your Apple device and set maths quizzes to complete in real time together in class. The apps communicate through a wireless network or Bluetooth and the host device tracks and keeps all the data for each quiz so you can see where your class need to improve. To set questions you just turn the sections on or off and the app chooses questions from these at random. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths

This is a truly amazing iPad app and 'soon to be launched' download for PCs which replaces a whole TV crew and studio. Capture your video and audio use like adjusting the sound levels, an in-build teleprompter and green screen effects to make spectacular footage. Edit your video directly in the app and add images, websites and Twitter feed as cutaways sections of the screen. You can publish online and export to YouTube. Download the app at https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/touchcast/id603258418 http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Video%2C+animation%2C+film+%26+Webcams