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Android 4 Schools

Apps and Devices for Schools

Tag Archives: free apps

Practice the Piano on Your Android Tablet

As a high school student I was heavily involved in all aspects of  my school’s band programs. I started playing trumpet in elementary school and by the time I was in high school I could play every brass instrument. At some point in my high school years I took it upon myself to try to teach myself how to play the piano. There was only one problem with that, I didn’t have a piano at home and the school only had two pianos available. Fast forward almost twenty years and access to a piano is a problem for far fewer students thanks to Android apps. Here are three Android apps that students can use to learn and practice the piano on Android tablets.

Piano Lesson Tutor is a free app offering video lessons for students. The lessons are designed for beginner to intermediate level piano students. The videos are hosted on YouTube so you could just find them there. Piano Lesson Tutor organizes the videos into lessons for you.

Piano Pro is a free app that puts a virtual piano keyboard on your tablet or phone. The keys are labeled to help beginners. Piano Pro has a series of play-along songs to help you learn to play the piano. The play-along activities are completed by playing the keys above which notes are appearing.

xPiano is a free app that also puts a virtual piano keyboard on your tablet. The keys are not labeled so you do have to know which notes are associated with which keys. xPiano has twelve different instrument sounds with which you can experiment. The app also has a recording option that you can use to save your music and export it to other projects.

Create QR Codes for GPS Coordinates to Create Scavenger Hunts

QR Droid is my favorite free QR code reader for Android devices. QR Droid website offers a free QR code generator that makes it very easy to create a QR code for just about anything. This weekend I installed a free plug-in for QR Droid called QR-GPS Plugin.

QR-GPS Plugin works with the free QR Droid app to allow you to quickly create QR codes for the GPS coordinates for wherever you are standing. You ca also manually input coordinates or manually input a location by entering an address. Whichever way you choose to input locations, the QR code that is generated for you can be share via text message, email, Twitter, or Facebook. You can also save the code to your SD card and print it. (Of course, if you emailed the QR code to yourself you could print it from there too).

When you scan the QR code generated by QR-GPS Plugin you can open it within a number of different Android apps including Google Earth, Google Maps,  and GPS Essentials. The QR Droid blog has detailed directions on how to use the QR-GPS Plugin.

For academic activities using the QR codes generated from QR-GPS Plugin, I have a few thoughts (with a little help from a friend).  First, since the codes easily open in Google Earth and Google Maps you could create geography puzzles in which students use clues to guess the location to which you’re leading them. Then to check their answers students scan the QR codes and open them in Google Earth or Google Maps on their tablets or phones. Second, create a scavenger hunt in which students go from location to location scanning QR codes to get directions to the next stop in the hunt. Finally, the QR codes could be scanned and saved in Google Maps or GPS essentials for students to use as part of a walking tour.

Iris – The Android Version of Siri, Kind Of

Siri is a phenomenally popular iOS service for speaking requests for information into your phone. When Siri was released Android users were left watching our iOS-using friends having all of the fun. Iris is a free Android app that is trying to do for Android users what Siri provided for iOS users.

Iris is a free app for Android phones and tablets that allows you to speak your requests for web search results, videos, directions, and more. Want to use your voice to send a text message? Iris can do that for you too.

The promo video for Iris is embedded below.

I’ve been testing Iris for a couple of weeks. In my testing I’ve found that it is better suited to giving commands for functions my phone than it is to searching the web. I found that I have to speak very slowly and clearly in order for search requests to be carried out accurately. Iris’s response to spoken commands could make it useful for students who have difficulty typing or touching commands to use and Android device.

Blog Posts on a Plane or Evernote for Android

You’ve heard of Snakes on a Plane, but have you heard of blog posts on a plane? I traveled a lot in March (19,000 miles according to US Airways) which meant I had a lot of time when I was disconnected from the web. Even though I was disconnected from the web I was still able to draft some blog posts. To do so, I used Evernote on my Samsung Galaxy Tab. Then when I reconnected to the web I simply copied and pasted and pasted my post into a blog post.

What does this mean for students? It means that they can take notes on their Android devices even when they cannot connect to the Internet. Of course, when they are connected to the web through their Android devices students can bookmark and annotate websites that they find useful in their research. The video below walks you through the features of Evernote for Android.

BoardTabla – Quickly Capture Presentations on Your Android Device

BoardTabla is a free Android app designed to help you quickly capture presentation slides on your phone or tablet. The app is basically a camera with some handy extras. To capture a slide just snap a picture with BoardTabla. BoardTabla will automatically crop sections like borders that aren’t needed. Once the image is captured you can write free-hand notes on the slides.

BoardTabla could be a handy Android app for students to quickly capture slides and annotate them in a way that makes them meaningful to them. BoardTabla allows for sharing of slides through email, text messaging, and Facebook. The sharing function could be helpful for students to send notes to classmates who are absent from class.

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