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A review of educational apps

Mobile apps seem to enhance study habits, including classroom assignments. It also benefits the teachers.

This is an expansion of an earlier Tweet. Many of these apps use Augmented Reality in order to bridge the present with the past.

in response to Jen Lavalle's post about games having to go cross-platform to survive. Adobe, makes of the Flash platform, have announced they are stopping further development of the plugin for mobile devices. They are instead now going to focus on open standards (like HTML5), to allow content to be viewed on all modern devices (mobile and computers) with no plug in required. They will also focus on tools to allow developers to push content speciically to the app stores of today's most popular mobile devices. This is a good & bad sign for app developers who use Flash (lots of them, it's been an industry standard for years. Flash has suffered from terrible performance on mobile devices, so it's good to see Adobe acknowledging the need to do something different for their mobile strategy. But what this means for the tools developers will (need to learn to) use? TBD...

From text to speech solutions to describing dyslexia, this is a great list of apps for reading challenges. For EDC

Free webinar tomorrow (9/27) from Tech&Learning on Google Chromebooks and Apps for Education - Power of the Web for TEaching and Learning 

I hope more organizations create a home for failed apps. We can learn from what went wrong or consider why an option never caught on.

The author makes a case for mobile learning for professionals with the Android App - Google Goggles... are there other uses that people see of the app in the k-12 sector?

Top 50 iPhone applications for educators and some of them are free.

While many of the apps listed are organization the teaching tools and media lists have some great apps for the classroom. For EDC

This article talks about how handheld technologies such as android and iPhones can make the museum experience more educational by providing tour guides. Very few museums currently have apps for this purpose but the trend is growing. The actual museum experience can be much more educational when it is supplemented with self guided tours that handheld technologies can provide.

AR not ready for prime time because of inaccurate GPS data and apps that only provide information about locations within the user's line of sight.

Physical toys can be recognized by the iPad touch screen, utilized by free game app. The interaction (maybe requirement?) of physical toys, that must be purchased, in order to utilize a free app... curious to see if this kind of interaction will gain footing in education

I have experienced this first hand. Adults find it cute to watch their young children staring deeply into their cell phones (iphones) as they pop digital balloons, etc. Disruptive? Def. if you are sitting next to this family at a restaurant.

Relating to the discussion last class about potential directions AR and mobile apps may go -- this iPhone app allows users to experience a location (in this case, Rome) as it existed in the past.  Provides images and historical info for all users, but if the user is actually at the Coliseum, it uses the iPhone camera + gps and presents actual 3D renditions of the past of whatever is in the user's viewfinder

I'mOK is a mobile app that rewards your kids for taking responsibility for staying connected. Checking in with parents is gamefied so that by checking-in to locations earns you points.

interesting premise.. first thing I thought was, it's taking something kids *might* be into (gameification, badges, etc) and mixes it with something they dread (letting their parents know where they are, what they're doing) -- what's the point for kids? What benefit can they draw? Why would they want to earn badges or points in game/app their parents suggested? ... But as the homepage suggests, the premise of parents using this app/system to translate the app's points into real-life rewards (a currency system that parents & kids can negotiate together)... that's an interesting idea. Maybe this kind of arrangement can actually work in some cases. But with gameification in general, I'm wondering about the likelihood of true internalization. Usually we're wondering the question of if kids are actually learning content for the long-term when intertwining it with the motivating factors of game elements. But now this adds on a layer of moral values, obligations, responsibility... are kids going to internalize that they should keep their parents in the loop cause their parents worry, it's the right/responsible thing to do? Or will it stay at the "well I'm earning points/money/privileges"...

Nestled between Julia Auster's fantasy football app and Facebook Messenger is a relatively new bucket of apps: the education tools she uses in the French classes she teaches at Robert Adams Middle School in Holliston, Mass. Auster isn't alone.

"Edu-Tainment" - Leo's Pad app is like a TV show infused with educational activities which are masked as games.

Here's an article highlighting the development of apps that engage users (in this case, kids) in the world around them...