Essential iPad Apps for Every Classroom Teacher

Essential iPad Apps for Every Teacher

Here's a list of some tried, tested, and approved apps for every teacher! Add your own suggestions in the comments below!

Plan

Noteshelf is a great app for taking high quality hand-written notes. You can make your own page templates (lesson plan templates, assessment templates, note templates, and more) and add your own writing to it.











Daily Notes is a great app for getting organized and planning. It allows you to prioritize task lists, Add photos and documents, and sync up with your cloud platforms (Dropbox, Evernote, etc).

Google Calendar is a customizable calendar that you can share with others, collaborate on, and attach links, documents, and everything else. Turn your planner into a digital calendar that has everything you and your students need in one accessible place. Links with your Gmail and Google Docs.

Organize

Google Apps for Education is every teacher's bread and butter of being an effective digital teacher. Create documents, presentations, pictures, all backed by the power of the Google Drive cloud.

Dropbox is a fantastic cloud platform that allows you to sync across many devices. Not every app and device is compatible with Google Drive, so you need a solid cloud-based system to store all of your information. Dropbox is a great place to collaborate and share resources.

Picasa is a Google-based picture sharing, saving, and editing platform. A great way to save pictures of student work and activities throughout the year. Allows for editing of photos within the app and is very user friendly. Automatically back up your photos to Google+ and Google Drive!

Pinterest has made a solid reputation for itself as a great app for teachers to share resources and ideas. The ability to create boards, organize resources, and find high quality resources and ideas on just about anything makes it a must have for teachers of all disciplines.

 Pocket is relatively new on the scene compared to others, but after using it for one day, you'll be hooked. It works under the simple idea that if you find something you want to save for later, use Pocket to instantly save it. Instantly save articles, pictures, tweets, and anything you might want to use in your classroom. You can read what you save across all your devices, and it allows you to read articles distraction and advertisement free!

Evernote is an app that is designed to make note-taking a breeze. Create notes, save articles and photos, and view them on any device with Evernote. Tons of apps are starting to add Evernote as their platform for you to back up your files. A great app for quick note taking and saving resources!

Present 

Check out these great apps for creating, recording, and sharing incredible presentations and videos for flipped classroom lessons!

Haiku Deck

ShowMe - Create and share videos. Record yourself drawing on the iPad and add video and voice to it.

YouTube Kids - Filtered access to YouTube. Teachers and parents can add restrictions and organize videos for kids!

Splashtop Classroom - Share your desktop across student devices for engaging lessons that students can interact with.

Engage

Showbie is a platform to create a fully paperless classroom. Snap a photo of a handout, send it to your students, collect homework, and grade papers all on your iPad! Incredible for schools with 1-to-1 devices. Watch the video on Showbie's website and you'll be amazed.

Virtual Manipulatives! is a great app for math. Includes fraction, decimal, and percent bars that students can move around, combine, separate, and use to solve problems, as well as much more!

Flashcardlet allows you to make and share digital flashcards. Students can make multiple stacks, mark cards for review, and mark cards as mastered as they study. A nifty app for review and centers!

Bill Nye the Science Guy - If you're like me, then you only understand science because of Bill Nye the Science Guy's TV show. He's got a fantastic app that includes a lot of great games and resources for science educators and science students. Science rules!

Utilities

A handful of great apps that no teacher should ever leave home without! 

Google Classroom - Google's fantastic digital learning platform in app form. Create assignments, grade assignments, and collaborate with students from your iPad!

Class Dojo - Get students and parents engaged in behavior management.  A free app that allows you to record and track behavior and classroom success for each student. It is by far one of the best classroom apps available today. If you're in a school that has access, use it to its full power!

Running Record Calculator - A free calculator to do running records on your iPad with any document. Use this to record the time, number of errors, self corrections and more! A great tool for any reading teacher to assess fluency.

Remind (formerly Remind101) - A fantastic app for communicating with parents and students in a safe platform. Send text messages to parents and students without ever exchanging phone numbers. A safe way to send out mass communication and reminders to your students and parents.

ZipGrade - ZipGrade makes grading a breeze. When you give a test or quiz, have students use a ZipGrades scantron sheet. When they're finished, you just snap a picture of their sheet and the app automatically grades and records the data for you.

Noisli - If you're a teacher, chances are your day is high stress. Noisli is an app that plays various soothing sounds on a loop to help you focus, relax, and make your planning period a bit more peaceful. It's free on the web, or you can download it in app form for 1.99. It also offers a timer, distraction free writing and note taking!

Chrome Remote Desktop - one of my favorite apps and one that is severely underrated. With this simple app, you can access and use your desktop computer from your iPad. Leave your computer at work!