What can the iPad do? – For you the teacher.

Teachers want to Know What can an iPad do

If you are a teacher, you are undoubtedly already using a computer, and with all of the fuss and palaver about the iPad, you’re probably wondering what the iPad can do for you. How will you be able to use the iPad in your classrooms? Is it possible to integrate the use of the iPad into your classes? How can the iPad help you do your job, in terms of organisation and being effective as a teacher? For a professional teacher, these are all questions that you may wonder about, as you see technology taking a hold within the classroom for all subjects.

Unless you are a complete Luddite, and I suspect that some teachers will be, of that persuasion, then you will see some marvellous possibilities with using the iPad. Apart from being in the classroom, as a teacher you will always be in meetings, year meetings, for subject area and meetings where the full teaching staff get together. An iPad would be useful in these meetings for the taking of notes, and also for Keynote presentations, as required. What you can do is to quit using all those bits of paper that are so easy to loose and have everything on the iPad instead.

Bento
When looking at what can the iPad do, teachers have to deal with an awful lot of data about their classes of students, the iPad can be put into service, to deal with this. You have Bento for the iPad, which is a marvellous database and just right for class database information. Then perhaps you might just decide to use Numbers to record the attendance of students, or perhaps the marks achieved by students in your tests. The beauty of using something like Bento, is that you can create your own forms and organise the data that you want to enter and keep up-to-date with. On the other hand you do have applications such as Teacher Pal, Attendance, Teacher Tool, Educate and GradePad, which are set up specifically to do some of these tasks that you do in terms of organising everything.
The Amazing iPad

What can an iPad do with GradePad

Gradepad
If you decide to use the GradePad application, you can grade the performance of the student, directly from your iPad, and it is not expensive at the price of $2.99. With grade pad you can do various things such as manage your groups, create a new GradePad, look at your assessments and track performance. There are facilities within the application to be able to share the data that you have collected. Sharing of the data is useful not just for sending your data to other teachers, but also to share with other applications that you might need to use within your school.

Explain Everything for the iPad


free applications

iMage Tools

There are a number of applications available to record attendance of classes. Maybe you need to use a specific one for your school, if all of the other teachers are using the same data format and maybe application. The attendance applications vary in price and functionality, for example there is one called Attendance which costs $5.99 and it is intended to allow teachers to track records of the classes and has fancy features such as photo recognition. With the Attendance application you have an unlimited number of courses and you can also move a student from one class to another easily. There are other applications which include the ability to track attendance as part of other things that they do. I imagine that it would be very useful to have an application that does a number of things, such as keeping track of the grades, scores in tests as well as keeping an eye on the attendance record.
Teacher Tool
Among the applications for teachers that are free, you might look at the application, Educate and the Teacher Tool. I always recommend that it is a good idea to try out the free applications first, before spending out your hard earned cash, as the free ones might be all that you need. With Teacher Tool, it has a good synchronisation features with your Mac, allowing you to save an up-to-date copy as a backup of all your data, that you have entered.

What can the iPad do, application specific to subject area

There are a large number of applications that are specific to subject areas, chemistry, physics, geography and languages. So when looking at what can the iPad do, it is closely tied in with, what can the iPad applications do. For chemistry obviously, you have the periodic table of elements, there are free versions as well as versions that are better specified, in terms of functionality that cost a bit more. For biology you have applications such as biology glossary at $1.99 and the spiders study guide. There are a huge number of applications which look at space, planets and various aspects of astronomy. Among these applications you have Star Map and Sky Voyager which are more expensive at $11.99 and $14.99, to the free applications such as Go Sky Watch Planetarium: Free Solar Walk.

What can the iPad do for mathematics teachers

What can the iPad do Mathmagics
As you would expect with computers, you would have plenty of maths applications, including apps such as Algebra Solver for $.99 maths plus also for $.99 and trigonometry calculator which costs $2.99. One maths application I like is called Mathsmagic, and it teaches you how to do so mental arithmetic, really easily that will, aside from getting your brain working, will also have you amazing anybody with your brainpower. You will find that there are mathematics applications, which are suitable for the whole range of student levels. This is a super use of the iPad when looking at what can the iPad do.

iPad applications for the English teacher

There are applications available to help with the study of Shakespeare, for example, a large number of applications that are for reading books as well as applications that are tools such as dictionaries and thesaurus. As part of English classes, students will also have to do writing and there are a huge number of applications aimed towards the writer. As well as the office type applications for iPad, which can be used for this purpose, there are applications which are more suited for storytelling, such as Story Kit which is free and story pages at $2.99. For my own writing with the iPad, I like to use nebulous notes or SimpleNote along with using Scrivener on my Mac. I am looking forward to the day when there is Scrivener for iPad.
The Amazing iPad Another great app for teachers is Explain Everything. It is amazing what iPad can do to enhance the classroom strategy. An iPad for teachers of all sorts of subjects is the way that things are going in education, much better than having cheap netbooks in the classrooms. It is not surprising that loads of teachers around the world want to know what can the iPad 2 do for the learning and teaching systems. iPads for teachers is an area of growth in schools and many more will know what can the iPad do.