The lecture apps aren’t anything ground-breaking. They’re simply organized playlists of videos that are mostly from MIT and Khan Academy. The apps could be helpful for students who need a little refresher course on a topic that you have previously taught a lesson about.
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 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.
I tried two of Barron’s Educational Android apps; Painless Grammar and Painless Pre-Algebra. Both of the apps offer three games and three quizzes. In order to access the games students have to score 80% or better on the practice quiz.
The other apps available from Barron’s cover Algebra, Earth Science, Chemistry, Spanish, and Spelling. According to Barron’s these apps are intended for middle school and high school students.
EduPort is a free Android app that features nine highly informative YouTube channels. Those channels include Khan Academy, MIT, TED Talks, Stanford, and The New Boston. The New Boston is a channel that I only discovered when I installed the EduPort app. The New Boston features a mix of mathematics tutorials, computer science, and website development tutorials.
