Educating with Apps
5 Mobile Apps Teachers should use to Educate
Why Teach Using Apps?
So as for the answer to "Why teach using apps?"
As a teacher, you can't afford not to.
Your students WILL have phones, and your students WILL be using them during class. Taking the phones away is not really an option, as students guard them like dragons and will resent anyone who threatens them, and parents too may be uncooperative with a teacher who takes away a device or disciplines a child for using one.
The solution to this problem? Embrace the phone through apps. If you use apps to teach, students will be more engaged because of how they love using their phone. Students may still spend some time texting during class, but if you give them access to and encourage them to use these apps, they can make up that learning and more, all from their phones whenever/wherever they please. Phones can give more opportunities to teach, more ways to teach, and more enjoyment of being taught, all if included properly.
These 5 apps will give you some ideas on how exactly to use apps for lessons, or what kind of apps to look for.
#1 Duolingo
In a K-12 setting, this app is an excellent platform for providing your students with extra practice from anywhere they have their phones (Which in today's culture means everywhere).
#2 Khan Academy
A teacher could use it to compliment their in class lesson, or recommend it to students who require extra assistance or an extra means of representation of material.
#3 Dictionary.com
This app is more useful in education from about grade 6 and on, as the students will need a bit of their own vocabulary to make use of the definitions in a dictionary. When used by capable students it can expand vocabularies and read to eloquent papers and writing with new terms.
#4 Google Classroom
This is useful in all grade levels depending on their level of digital fluency. It can be used to great effect with students who often lose assignments of forget them at school as this app makes forgetting an assignment at school an inconsequential mistake.
#5 Google Drive
This is useful in much the same way as Google Classroom: it can allow you or your students more flexibility in the location and time you use a document or work on an assignment. You could work on a drive document from an airport in the middle of the night on a holiday: You never have to worry about access to an assignment or document on Google Drive as long as you have internet.
Image Citations
Dictionary.com Logo retrieved from:http://www.educationalappstore.com/images/upload/642-logo-unnamed.png
Duolingo Logo retrieved from: http://ipadinsight.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Duolingo_logo.pngGoogle Classroom Logo retrieved from: https://n9g240g14gn805g.storage.googleapis.com/Google-Classroom-Logo1.png
Google Drive Logo retrieved from: https://lh6.ggpht.com/k7Z4J1IIXXJnC2NRnFfJNlkn7kZge4Zx-Yv5uqYf4222tx74wXDzW24OvOxlcpw0KcQ=w300
Khan Academy logo retrieved from: http://www.ct4me.net/images/khan-academy-icon.jpg