TECH - iPad Literacy

For the TECH assignment this week, I elected to review three iPad applications that I believe that we can use in the classroom to enhance our students' ability to learn and create.  The apps I reviewed are Dictionary, Drawing Pad, and Strip Designer.

App #1: Dictionary

Dictionary is... well, it's a dictionary for the iPad.  While it may seem basic and self-explanatory, Dictionary offers a search feature for hundreds of thousands of words.  Once you select a word that you are searching for, Dictionary provides you with that word's meaning (or meanings, if there are several), the pronunciation of the word, and other information that is provided by standard, book dictionaries.  One of the best things that Dictionary offers, however, is a thesaurus tool.  Any word you have searched in Dictionary can be linked to a thesaurus as well, providing you and/or your students with a list of synonyms to use when writing papers!  It is this option that most impressed me when I booted up the app. 

With the thesaurus tool, the dictionary-like features, and the simple fact that it is just more easy to use than flipping through hundreds of pages in a physical dictionary, this is a must-own app.  Considering that it is free to download, there is no excuse why every iPad in every school shouldn't have it.

App #2: Drawing Pad

Drawing Pad, at first, seems like a simplistic drawing tool with which you can create fun little images to share with friends.  And while that is mostly true, there is a lot of depth if you're willing to play around with it a bit.  Drawing Pad offers lots of drawing tools.  Colored Pencils, markers, crayons, and more make up the basics, but there are also some really cool backdrops you can insert that are already made, as well as several of what I call "stickers" to import to your drawing.  These "stickers" are premade images like cars and rocket ships that you can insert into your drawing.  So even if you aren't skilled enough to draw your own detailed car, you have an image you can go ahead and put in there that doesn't rely on your artistic skills.  Doing this, you can still draw around the image, adding all kinds of flair and fluff to it. 

One of the coolest features for those old enough to use e-mail and social media is that you can share any drawing you create on Twitter and in an e-mail from an in-app button.  So if you're really proud of that cat you drew, you can send it to your friends or share it with the world with an easy tap.

Drawing Pad is a great little tool that will allow students (and anyone else) to express their creativity, even if they aren't the most artistically talented person out there.

App #3: Strip Designer

Strip Designer is an app in which you can create your own comic-book-like pages using pictures or images you've drawn.  While it's too simplistic and limited to use to create a real comic book experience, it is a fun tool to use to create humorous to memorable images and organize them in a comic book format.  You can take photos of your friends and place them in the different panels on the page, and from there you can move them around, add speech bubbles, stickers, and classic 1960's Batman-like "sound effects."  So if you want to use a picture of one of your friends smacking another friend in the face, you can add a "ZONK" effect to the page to give it a more humorous effect.

This would be a fun way to let students express themselves by taking photos of all kinds of things and letting them play around with the app to do all sorts of projects.  While it isn't the best app of its kind that I've used, it does have some nice features, but I think I prefer Comic Life to this one, personally.