iTouch/iPad Apps
Cognitive Difficulties
Earth Envi
Earth Envi is described as: "The whole earth, in your pocket!...Earth Envi gives you access to some of the most amazing Web-based space photos of our home planet that you'll ever see..."
This App would be great for those with Cognitive Difficutlies because they will be able to use at touch screen to look through photos that could be used for their project.
This App would be great for those with Cognitive Difficutlies because they will be able to use at touch screen to look through photos that could be used for their project.
Volcano Information
This app is to be used as an informational tool about volcanoes. This app would be great for students with cognitive difficulties because they would be able to physically sort through the different information that they would need to complete their report.
Physical Difficulties
Dragon Dictation
Dragon Dictation is described as an easy-to-use voice recognition application powered by Dragon NaturallySpeaking that allows you to easily speak and instantly see your text or email messages. This app would be crucial for those students who have a tough time typing as they could use their iTouch to be a voice recorder for them, save it as an email and send it to themselves to be placed into their project.
Speak it!
Speak it! is described as the most advanced speech solution in the App Store! It can read your emails, favorite news articles, documents and more while you exit the app and do other things with your iPhone or iTouch. This app would be great for students that need software to read their information to them. You can open this app, select text and it will read it aloud. This would be great for this project.
Sensory Difficulties
Typ-O
Typ-O is an App that is desinged for dyslexics and even non-native english speakers as it combines a powerful prediction engine, and a sphisticated spelling error model to provide users with word predictions even if their spelling is less than perfect. This would be great for this project to help the students who have issues with dyslexia. It would allow them to type and give them options if they are unsure of how a word is spelling.
Photoshop.com Mobile
Photoshop.com Mobile might be an App that most people wouldn't coniser to be educational, let alone one that would be used for students with sensory disorders. But they are able to use this app to manipulate their pictures for their report by using their fingers. This way they wouldn't get as frustrated by using the mouse. This app will allow the students to crop or rotate pictures, and even add boarders to them. Definitely one that students can have fun with and ad some creativity to their project.
At-Risk Students
SimpleMind - mindmapping
SimpleMind - mindmapping is a great app for students who may not have the best organizational skills or in need of some visual references to what they are doing. This is why I picked this app for At-Risk students, especially ESL students. In my experience, the more visual I make projects the better they may do, and this is a simple tool for them to be able to map out their project.
Wikipedia Mobile
There is a lot of debate out there about the use of Wikipedia in schools, but it is still one of the most widely used reference tools on the internet. This app makes Wikipedia even easier to use. Students can use this app for their research of their project. Even more for at-risk students, this is an easy tool for them to be able to use for their project.
Gifted and Talented Students
iMovie
I have used iMovie for both Mac and on the iPhone, and video editing doesn't get much more simplified than this. iMovie allows the students to record, edit, and export their videos all from the iPhone. Not this doesn't work with iTouch yet so an iPhone will be needed for this. This allows the student to do all their work from one place and they will not have to worry about taking the video, exporting it to the computer, then editing, finalizing and exporting it to dvd, the app does it all. For this project, I can't think of a better app to use for videos.
Google Earth
Lastly, for that student that just wants to take their project to the next step, why not include a 3-D map. Google Earth allows you to find what you are looking for, and take a screen shot (using the iTouch screen shot feature) and post that picture to your project. This app is really easy to use, and a lot of fun too as you can find any spot on earth with it.