iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

"WINTER GARDEN, Fla. — On the wall of a classroom that is home to the West Orange High School TikTok club, large loopy words are scrawled across a whiteboard: “Wanna be TikTok famous? Join TikTok club.”

It’s working. “There’s a lot of TikTok-famous kids at our school,” said Amanda DiCastro, who is 14 and a freshman. “Probably 20 people have gotten famous off random things.”

The school is on a quiet palm-tree-lined street in a town just outside Orlando. A hallway by the principal’s office is busy with blue plaques honoring the school’s A.P. Scholars. Its choir director, Jeffery Redding, won the 2019 Grammy Music Educator Award.

Amanda was referring to a different kind of stardom: on TikTok, a social media app where users post short funny videos, usually set to music, that is enjoying a surge in popularity among teenagers around the world and has been downloaded 1.4 billion times, according to SensorTower.

The embrace of the app at this school is mirrored on scattered campuses across the United States, where students are forming TikTok clubs to dance, sing and perform skits for the app — essentially drama clubs for the digital age, but with the potential to reach huge audiences.

And unlike other social media networks, TikTok is winning over some educators, like Michael Callahan, a teacher at West Orange, who had never heard of TikTok before the students told him about it."

Taskade is an excellent productivity tool we have recently discovered through Product Hunt. It allows you to turn new tabs into notepads with powerful features. You can instantly capture your thoughts and jot them down in a distraction-free editor, create to-do lists and checklists, outline your weekly tasks, plan for your projects and stay organized. More importantly, Taskade offers collaborative features that enable you to work with your team in real time and share with them lists and outlines you create.

Sometimes an app truly demonstrates the power of mobile.

Google’s Science Journal app transforms your mobile device into a little science laboratory, encouraging students to conduct authentic experiments, collect and visualize data and record observations from the world around them. Use it to  enhance learning in your classrooms and in the field, and to facilitate the development of your own citizen scientists.

"Plum's Creaturizer from PBS Kids is a free iOS and Android app hat lets students create fun cartoon creatures then place them into outdoor settings through the use of augmented reality. The purpose of the app is to have students learn and show how the characteristics of an animal help it thrive in its environment."

Microsoft released a new app called Photos Companion that lets you wirelessly move photos between your phone and PC.

As we mentioned in an earlier article, Apple has long-promised to make a major splash in the AR market. With the recent release of the Apple augmented reality developer framework, ARKit, consider the market properly splashed.


Building a complete, full-featured app is beyond the scope of a single article. However, we can show you, in simplest terms, how to create augmented reality apps for iPhone and iPad using the Unity 3D AR/VR platform with ARKit. Our simple example will display an AR point cloud superimposed over objects you can view with your Apple device.

Synthia, a Compassion beneficiary from Kenya, joined with four classmates to develop an app to end female genital mutilation—and won second place at Google’s 2017 Technovation Challenge.

Typically, each social media craze that consumes students is greeted by educators with deep wariness, if not complete revulsion and efforts to ban an app.

Think Snapchat and the now shuttered YikYak, etc., etc.

But TikTok—an app that allows users to make short, silly videos set to music—is being embraced by some schools, The New York Times reported. West Orange High School in Florida, for example, has formed a TikTok club, according to The Times. 

A remarkable Android/iOS app where you can record short videos and transform into pieces of art using filters powered by artificial intelligence. Choose from a range of filters.

"Human Anatomy Atlas 2019 is one of the best apps out there for understanding the human body. The app is a little bit pricey ($24.99) but is definitely worth the investment. It offers special pricing for teachers and educators. It has also been featured in the American Association of School Librarians (AASL)'s list of the best apps for teaching and learning 2018. Human Anatomy Atlas offers a wide variety of educational materials and resources to help students better comprehend how the human body functions. These include more than 10.000 anatomical models in different languages (e.g., English, Spanish, Italian, German, French etc), 6000 structures in each model, animations demonstrating muscle movements in 3D models,  textbook-level definitions, a powerful search engine,  encyclopedic references, and many more."

"Apple’s iWork suite – Pages, Keynote, and Numbers – have all received updates to version 5.0.

Here are the release notes for all of the new updates to version 5.0."

Smartphones and tablets have quickly become a permanent part of students' daily lives. Kids up to 8 years old spent almost an hour a day on mobile devices, Common Sense Media reported last year.

And the amount of time kids spend with screens only increases as they get older. On average, 13- to 18-year-olds spend about nine hours a day on entertainment media, much of which is on tablets and smart phones.

But mobile devices don't have to be a distraction. When they are used for project-based learning, research has shown they can improve classroom engagement and student learning across grade levels.

"What you have is an increasing number of schools that are requiring their teachers to receive professional development in technology integration," says Dee Lanier, a program coordinator for EdTechTeam, an international company that trains educators on how to use technology in the classroom.

When teachers ask Lanier what they should look for in an app, he tells them to keep four values in mind: cost-effective, cross-platform, cloud-based and collaborative. Much like the "four C's of credit," he writes, there are "four C's of app selection."

"Apple is launching a new Measure app in iOS 12 in the next few months that will let you size anything with just your iPhone.

You no longer have to go searching for a tape measure while hanging pictures or when trying to determine if a couch will fit in your living room.

I recently tried the new Measure app in Apple's iOS 12 developer beta. It uses the advanced cameras on newer iPhones like the iPhone X, and will presumably work on Apple's new batch of devices coming soon.

Other augmented reality apps — the type that let you interact with the real world through your phone — have been available in the iTunes App Store and for Android phones. But this is the first time Apple has introduced its own version.

Here's a preview."

Google Tasks has been around for nearly ten years. While digital to-do lists are great for keeping yourself organized, Google’s attempt always felt like a half-effort. With no official mobile app, you had to turn to a third-party app to access your tasks from your smartphone or tablet, or you had to pull up the mobile version of Gmail on your favorite browser—as if.

Finally, Google has seen the light and released a dedicated Tasks app for both Android and iOS. And, as we noted yesterday, Tasks now has its own dedicated section on the right-hand side of Gmail itself, which is much better implementation than the uglier Tasks window that looked more like a chat box in prior versions of Gmail—only really accessible from a buried menu in Gmail’s interface, too.

Here in 2018, there are a bonkers number of different fitness apps. Some let you drill down to receive mind-boggling amounts of data about your fitness levels. Others boast a sarcastic A.I. leading you through your workout. Still others promise to scare you fit by plunging you into an immersive zombie apocalypse scenario. One of the latest boasts a new hook that we’ve never come across before: It’ll help you train like an astronaut.

Oh, and if you’re particularly good at it, its creators might even send you into space for real!

Medha Gupta sometimes felt uneasy making the 20-minute walk from the corner where the school bus dropped her off to her home in Herndon, Virginia, - especially during the colder months when it would get dark early.

The popular Louvre HD app is free today and only for a limited period of time. The app provides you access to a huge library of some of the most popular works of art and paintings stored in the Louvre museum . After I downloaded the app this morning I spent sometime browsing through the collections there and found them really amazing. If you love modern art, this app is definitely for you.

A Six Nations school is doing its part to keep Indigenous languages alive in the most modern of ways — with an app.

Bottom Line: For flexible classrooms, creative teachers, and sharp students, Civilization V is the perfect platform for making rather than memorizing history.