Educational Mobile Apps
5 Mobile Apps that Promote Learning
StoryKit App
StoryKit App allows students to create new stories. They can make a story about their lives, or change the endings to classic stories, such as Little Red Riding Hood. They can even change the point of view the story is originally written in.
StoryKit would be extremely useful in an elementary English classroom. When students are working on making their writing better, they are encouraged to use their own creativity to alter well-known stories. StoryKit can be extremely helpful when students are doing this. It helps to encourage creative writing in the class, and forces students to create new ways of thinking about traditional stories.
Journal Jar
Journal Jar App- Students shake this app on their mobile device and they get a writing prompt. They are then given a certain amount of time to create a short story based on this prompt.
This is great to use for later elementary students (around grade 5 or 6) because they are starting to practice writing stories at this point. Rather than giving them all the same topic to write on, or trying to have them all think of their own topics (which can be extremely difficult for some students), the teacher can have them use this app to give them some help in choosing topics and to help students let the creativity flow when they are writing their stories.
Create a Comic
The Create a Comic Android App allows the students to create a comic on any topic the teacher chooses.
This would be likely beneficial for Junior High students that are learning different ways to express ideas. A good activity that would use the Create a Comic app would be to have students watch an educational video that is related to a topic they are learning in class. Often, these videos do not hold the attention of students the way teachers may want. Including questions on the video does help, but how much of this information do students actually retain? A better activity to have them do on the video they just watched is to have them create a comic on the Create a Comic app about the video. It forces them to understand the video on a deeper level and allows them to reword the story of the video in a way they understand.
mobL21
The mobL21 app allows the teacher to create flashcards, study guides, lessons, and other items that may help benefit students when they are studying for tests and working on assignments. Being able to access resources created by their teacher on their mobile devices will definitely help students when they are working on assignments or studying for tests. For example, if the teacher is testing them on the Science weather unit, he or she can include flashcards, practice quizzes, and study guides on the app so students can have full access to them to help them with their studying.
QR Readers/Generators
Quick Response Readers/Generators allow a teacher to create a QR code that can be scanned by most mobile devices to lead students to a URL or app that can help them with their studying. This is especially good for students that have issues reading a lot of information on the topic they are supposed to be learning about. A teacher can include a QR code into his or her notes for students that may contain quick notes on the topic, an interactive activity, or a short quiz to test their knowledge. This helps to keep students’ attention sharp and gives them another option for learning on the specific subject.