Education Apps and Eval Forms

We have chosen and annotated five apps for education.  I am a secondary adolescent teacher and I for my content area I explored Discovery Education Techbook and People HD. Discovery is a great app that covers all content areas and delivers content in a way only discovery can do, and its content aligns with Common Core.  With this you can organize content, organizers, maps, quizzes etc. per class and student so teachers are organized and students know what expectations are.  People HD is more of a note taking and studying app, it comes loaded with dozens of important historical figures and allows users to add their own important figures they are studying.  This app is much more limited than Discovery but will be a quick and easy way for students to use technology in the classroom.  We also found a childhood app called BrainPop; this provides learning activities for students with score tracking and opportunity to improve scores.


We found a couple of management tools for teachers, Teacher Kit and Common Core Standards.  The Common Core Standards app will make lesson planning a lot easier because it make finding and using standards a much quicker process.  Teacher Kit is to be used as a classroom management tool providing seating charts, attendance, grade book, scheduling etc. Neither app is a groundbreaking idea but both have potential to make me work a little more efficiently.


People HD was put to the test with the evaluation forms and I found the Critical Evaluation of a Content-Based Mobile App and the Evaluation Rubric for iPod Apps.  Traditionally, I like rubrics for evaluating because it uses a scale but the rubric did not provide for the name of the app, comments for content; it was just a rubric.  The other form asked 10 questions that dealt more with student learning, levels of Bloom's addressed, and a summary space.  This gave a more well-rounded evaluation and will allow the evaluator to share their information. I especially appreciated the Bloom's portion and the opportunity to provide a summer; a description of the app can explain the utility of the app beyond the yes and no questioning.