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Hottest Apps used by Apple Distinguished Educators

Below is a collection of tutorials, lesson plans and applications for educators to utilize.

“It’s not about the box. It’s about changing the culture of instruction — preparing students for their future, not our past.”

Mooresville ranks 100th out of 115 districts in North Carolina in terms of dollars spent per student — $7,415.89 a year — but it is now third in test scores and second in graduation rates.

Some costly items had become obsolete (like computer labs), though getting rid of others tested the willingness of teachers to embrace the new day: who needs globes in the age of Google Earth?

The iPad could give rise to a new creative self-publishing crowd that could, in turn, become competition for the established publishing industry.

A funny thing happened once the actual SDK was released to the broader development community: small houses and individual programmers delivered the first round of best selling games before the big companies got their products to market.

I suspect the first group to really embrace this will be educators who have created course material that includes audio and video, along with standard text. Authors of how-to books may also embrace video to enhance the learning process. Better yet, authors can take advantage of Apple's distribution power by making each book an app that can be sold through the iBookstore. By doing this, authors bypass publishers altogether.

The iPad might face similar hurdles. Thanks to its multiple functionality (not to be confused with multitasking), it will no doubt be popular as an entertainment device for surfing the web, playing games and listening to music, but from an educational standpoint, these functions might serve to distract students from their scholastic pursuits. Furthermore, while some might view the iPad’s touch screen as an advantage, when trying to take notes, it might prove unwieldy.

Minutes after Apple unveiled its widely anticipated iPad on Jan. 27, ACU's student-run Optimist declared it would be the first collegiate newspaper to publish on the new device.

The Optimist app now appears in the Apple store and is downloadable on the first wave of the devices.

"The students were doing the coding, the students were doing the planning, students were doing the design," said Dr. Kenneth Pybus, assistant professor of journalism and mass communication and faculty adviser for The Optimist. "It might have gone smoother it if were top-down, but smooth is not what we're going for – education is what we're going for, and education isn't always smooth."

Reed College plans to do a formal experiment with iPads by loading the devices with class readings and giving them to students  to see how they compare with traditional textbooks.