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Android 4 Schools

Apps and Devices for Schools

Art Academy – Thousands of Paintings and Hundreds of Artists in One App

Art Academy is a free Android app that may be of interest to teachers and students of art history. Art Academy is a catalog of more than 4000 paintings. Each painting is linked to some basic information about the artist who created it. Art Academy also provides links to the museum in which each artwork can be found. Through those links you can learn more about the museum, the artist, and the painting.

Art Academy allows you to send the images to your favorite online storage service like Dropbox or Evernote. You can also download images from Art Academy to store on your Android tablet.

One short-coming of the app, as is pointed out in the comments in the Android Market, is that it does not appear include modern artwork. The app also seems to only function in portrait mode on a tablet.

Animal Life – A Small Encyclopedia of Animals

Animal Life is a nice Android app that puts an encyclopedia of animals on your Android tablet or phone. The app features pictures and sounds of hundreds of animals. Animal Life divides the animals basic categories; mammals, birds, and reptiles. Along with each picture Animal Life provides some basic information about each animal’s habitat, range, size, color, and family. You can click through each animal’s page to read more on Wikipedia.

Animal Life is mostly free, but accessing some animals on the app requires that you upgrade to the “pro” version of the app for one dollar (USD). In testing Animal Life I noticed that roughly 10% of the animals were locked in the free version of the app.

Animal Life could be a good little app for elementary school students to experience the sight and sound of animals that they’re studying in their science lessons.

iNaturalist – An App for Sharing Observations of Nature

Cross-posted on Free Technology for Teachers

iNaturalist is a community website for sharing pictures and observations of plants and animals. To enable easy sharing of observations, iNaturalist offers a free Android app and a free iOS app. Using the apps you can take a picture, geo-locate it, write your observations, and upload to the iNaturalist community. If your observation is incomplete, for example if you’re not sure of a scientific name, you can ask the community to add comments to improve the recording of your observation.

I learned about iNaturalist through an excellent post on the Google Lat Long Blog that outlined the efforts of a group to compile a large collection of observations about the Pepperwood Preserve in California. Pick a woodlot or nature preserve in your area and have your school build a record of observations about that area.

SyncSpace – A Shared Whiteboard App for Android

I included this app in my Christmas Day post 11 Awesome Apps to Try on Your New Android Device, but I think that it deserves a stand alone post of its own.

Sync Space is a whiteboard app available for Android devices and iOS devices. You can use Sync Space to create drawings and documents on your tablet. You can create using free-hand drawing tools, using typing tools, or a combination of the two tool sets. Your drawings and documents can be sent to and synced with other users so that they can comment and edit your drawings and documents. If you have installed an app like Evernote or Dropbox you can upload your drawings to either of those accounts too. Learn more about Sync Space in the video below.

Automatically Send Images to Your Dropbox Account

Dropbox is one of my favorite services for saving all kinds of files online. Recently, Dropbox added a new auto-sync option for images captured on your Android phone or tablet. Now when you snap a picture it can be automatically uploaded to your Dropbox account.

The Google+ Android app also has an auto-upload feature, but there are two problems with it that the Dropbox app doesn’t have. First, the Dropbox upload is not resized so the resolution you capture it in is the resolution it is saved in. Second, the images you upload to your Dropbox account are private by default.

I’ve previously written about how I use Dropbox to help me reduce email overload when collecting assignments from students. The Dropbox Android app has been installed on my phone and tablet since the day that I got them. The app makes it very easy to save and view the contents of my Dropbox account.

For a complete overview of the purpose of Dropbox, watch the video below.

H/T to Techcrunch.

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