Best Practice

Ten top primary apps

Classroom ICT Handheld devices
We asked Justin Smith from the Educational App Store to give us his top 10 apps for primary teachers.
Image: Adobe Stock

 

Tablets are already altering the face of mobile computing in schools and teachers are becoming more and more interested in finding out the best content they can use on their devices.

With tens of thousands of apps labelled educational or designed for teaching and learning it can prove challenging to find the very best. With this in mind, we have put together a list with 10 great apps that we recommend to help you to enhance your activities in the classroom.

 

Educreations Interactive Whiteboard. Price: Free (iOS)

Educreations turns your iPad into a recordable whiteboard. Creating a video tutorial is as simple as touching, tapping and talking. Explain a maths formula, create an animated lesson, add commentary to your photos or diagram a sports play. It includes voice recording, realistic digital ink, photos and text, and simple sharing through email, Facebook or Twitter.

Socrative Teacher. Price: Free (Android and iOS)

Socrative brings smart clickers to a new level and helps teachers to engage the entire classroom with educational quizzes. Teachers can create different type of exercises (multiple-choice, true/false, etc) and the app can help you save time with marking and lesson planning. Pupil responses can be viewed immediately on a graph and the app will email you a report.

SuperCard Flashcards. Price: Free (Android)

SuperCard is a beautifully designed flashcard app that provides multiple ways to create image or text flash cards. There are three quiz types and two modes to help you study.

CamScanner – Phone PDF Creator. Free (Android)

CamScanner helps you scan, store, sync and collaborate on various content across SmartPhones, iPads, tablets and computers. Just use your phone/tablet camera to scan and digitize all kinds of paper documents: receipts, notes, invoices, whiteboard discussions, business cards, certificates, etc. Make annotations on documents with a full set of editing tools. Also customized watermarks are made available to mark your own documents. If you want to protect confidential content, you can set a password for viewing important documents.

Nearpod. Price: Free (iOS and Android)

Nearpod is a must have application for teachers and schools that have access to a set of iPads, iPods or iPhones for their classes. The Nearpod platform enables teachers to use their iPads to manage content on students’ iOS devices. It combines presentation, collaboration, and real-time assessment tools into one solution. 

Edmodo. Price: Free (Android and iOS)

Edmodo provides a safe and easy way for teachers and students to engage and collaborate. It is a private communication platform that will allow users to access their homework, grades, school notices, share useful information and send reminders.

Teach by Knowmia. Price: Free (iOS)

Teach by Knowmia is a new free lesson planning and recording tool for teachers and their students. It helps you create short video lessons on any subject and publish them on Knowmia.com so students, other teachers and the public can find them. A great feature of the app is that it allows teachers to use the iPad’s camera to record themselves while drawing on the screen so that students can see them while they explain the lesson.

Microsoft Excel App. Price: Free (iOS)

The Microsoft Excel App aims to help you ensure your Excel spreadsheets look great on the iPad. When you edit or create spreadsheets, you can be confident they will look exactly how you want across PC, Mac, tablet and phone. Excel for iPad has the familiar Office look and feel along with an intuitive touch.

KhAndroid. Price: Free (Android and iOS)

KhAndroid is a fully accessible Android application that enables its users to view Khan Academy’s wonderful library of more than 2,200 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube. Topics covered include maths, history, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and economics. Khan Academy is a not-for-profit educational organisation created in 2006 by Salman Khan with the mission of “providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere”. All of Khan Academy’s resources are available to anyone.

Tapucate – Teacher App. Price: £6.99 (Android)

Tapucate is a professional app for teachers to help them manage all the information of their classes, students, grades and so on, keeping track of issues such as exams, assignments, behaviour and attendance. The app is intuitive to use and customisable.