Big Fat Canvas could be a good free Android app for students to create sketches and free-hand mind maps to outline or demonstrate concepts. Over the years I’ve tried a variety of templates for creating mind maps, yet I always come back to drawing them out free-hand. If you have students who think the same way that I do, Big Fat Canvas could be a great app for them.
Yesterday, I published a list of eleven apps for teachers and school administrators to try on their new Android devices. If one of your children or students received a new Android device during this holiday season here are eleven apps that you and they should check out.
1. Math Workout is a free Android app for practicing your basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division skills. You can choose from six different practice activities. Each activity has its own series of progressively harder challenges. I started out using just the addition and multiplication activities that provide twenty problems to solve in your head. Your score for the activity is based on accuracy and speed. So that you can see if you’re improving from day to day, Math Workout keeps a record of your scores for you.
Here’s a short video review of Math Workout. (Note, this video review is of the “pro” version which offers more challenges and is ad-free).
3. Google Books is a great place to find free books and books for sale to read on your Android phone or tablet. Google claims that they have more than three million books and periodicals available for free. I haven’t counted so I’ll take their word for it. The free books tend to be titles whose copyright protections have expired. The Red Badge of Courage is one such example of that.
4. MeeGenius is a nice source of free and paid ebooks for kids. When children open the ebooks online, on an Android tablet, or on an iPad they can choose to have the story read to them or to read the story on their own. When the story is read to them each word in the story is highlighted on the page. This should help children follow along with the story.
5. Here’s a nice little app for the aspiring artist in your life. How to Draw Cartoons Animals is a free Android app that offers seventy simple step-by-step directions for drawing cartoon animals. Despite the name, the app also offers directions for drawing objects like cups and houses and directions for drawing people. To be clear, you don’t draw the cartoons on the app. The app only provides the directions for you to follow while you draw on paper.
Are you looking for a great way to create drawings on your Android tablet or Android phone? Do you want a free Android app for taking pictures and marking them up? If so, give Skitch for Android a try.
The first thing you should know about Skitch is that it is now owned by Evernote. So anything you create on Skitch for Android can be saved in your Evernote account. And when you log into the Skitch website you can do so with an Evernote account or a Skitch account credentials. Drawings you create Skitch can also be saved in your Google Docs account, Picassa album, sent to email, or Tweeted from your Android tablet or Android phone.
There are three ways that you can use Skitch for Android. You can create a drawing from scratch. Capture and image with your Android tablet or Android phone. Or you can use alter an image that you have saved in an Evernote or Picassa album. Whichever method you choose to start with the set of drawing tools is the same. You can drawing free-hand, type text, crop images, draw arrows, and highlight and move elements that you have drawn. The saving and sharing options are the same regardless of which method you employ to create your images.
If your school has Android tablets for your students, Skitch for Android is an app you should try. Students can use the app to create drawings from scratch to use in multimedia projects. Or students could use Skitch to annotate images to explain what they’re seeing. I’m thinking that it could be neat to take students on a nature walk with a list of plants that they need to try to recognize. Have students take along an Android tablet or Android phone to capture pictures of the plants when they see them and write captions for each image.
