Apps can target an immense variety of educator and student needs

50-appBy now, apps have cemented their place as valuable resources for students, teachers, and administrators. But these apps go deeper, helping educators transform teaching and learning while promoting essential skills such as critical thinking and collaboration.

“There’s no one app that’s better than all the others,” said Michelle Luhtala, head librarian at New Canaan High School in Connecticut, while presenting a list of 50 apps that educators and students might find useful.

Luhtala featured apps that have been crowsourced by a handful of her colleagues and students. The apps promote and target 21st-century skills such as collaboration and creativity.

(Next page: 30+ apps for educators and students)

We’ve featured 30 of the resources she mentioned, and you can find the full resource list online.

Check out Luhtala’s presentation for all the apps and tools she mentioned, as well as to discover how these apps are used in real classrooms.

1. Kidblog: This app is very simple, intuitive, and educators said they felt students were writing much better after they knew their work would be published digitally.

2. Aurasma: An augmented reality app. Students are using the app to “attach” videos to books in their school library, and when other students hover mobile devices over each book, they have access to the student’s video review of the book.

3. Pinterest: One educator is using the pinboard site as a portal for parents who want to support their learners at home. Teachers are adding pins in different classroom subject areas or lesson areas and parents can access those materials at home.

4. 30hands: This storytelling app lets students take pictures, annotate, record voices, and transform it into video.

5. Adobe Voice: This is a brand new presentation tool with great templates for storytelling. It also offers a library of copyright-friendly music and images for use.

6. Book Creator: Students can pull in images, multimedia, texts, and can create their own books. Books can be sent over eMail, as PDFs, and more.

7. Tellagami: This app offers enhanced storytelling with an avatar, which is popular with young students.

8. Biblionasium: Teachers can set up favorite books and recommended lists on virtual bookshelves that are available to students at all times. Students can eMail their reading logs instead of handing them in on paper; teachers can set up fun challenges and rewards that will encourage students to keep reading.

9. BrainPOP and myBrainPOP: Students can complete lessons in BrainPOP, take notes in a notetaking app, and then use My BrainPOP to keep track of all their work.

10. Chromville: This app offers an augmented reality experience. Students download and color a blank coloring page. When they hover over the image with a mobile device, the image comes to life. The app promotes storytelling, as young students develop characters and storylines to accompany their images.

11. Clear: A gesture-based organization app.

12. Digital Passport from CommonSense Media: This app helps students cultivate their digital citizenship skills.

13. CrowdFlik: This app takes simultaneous recordings from different people (i.e., people recording an event such as a concert or wedding) and stores it in the cloud. Users can edit those mini-recordings together into a movie with multiple viewpoints.

14. EasyBib: This bibliography generator helps students determine what style they need and how different citations appear.

15. NoodleTools: Users can use one tool for note-taking, outlining, citations, research, and more. 

16. eduClipper: This tools aims to help students and educators save time and build personal learning networks.

17. edWeb.net: This resource for educators offers a multitude of communities, webinars, and discussions on targeted education topics.

18. Evernote: This app enables users take notes, create to-do lists, record voice reminders, and more.

19. ExplainEverything: This interactive whiteboard and screencasting tool lets users import and insert documents, pictures, or video, while drawing and annotating.

20. Follett Destiny: School staff have immediate access to circulation functions on the go.

21. DestinyQuest: Students can search and access library resources from mobile devices using this app.

22. Follett Titlewave: This mobile app helps teachers and librarians assess and improve their library collections.

23. GV Connect: This app integrates with a user’s existing Google Voice account and lets them place calls from their Google Voice number, listen to messages, send and receive texts, forward calls, and more.

24. Green Screen: This app from DoInk lets users create green screen videos from mobile devices. Users can combine up to three image sources at one time, use live or prerecorded video, and more.

25. Haiku Deck: Innovative and inspiring presentation software.

26. SlideIdea: A presentation app that makes it easy to create slides and share with others.

27. Hopscotch: This app lets students drag and drop blocks of code to create their own programs.

28. Lightbot: This coding tool combines coding and puzzle solving to engage users.

29. iMovie: This app enables users to browse and share videos and clips they have created.

30. Paper from FiftyThree: Users can create digital ink organizational displays and can easily share those ideas.

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Laura Ascione
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