In June, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their Best Apps for Teaching and Learning 2018. The apps encourage qualities such as creativity and collaboration and encourage discovery and curiosity.

This app provides great videos with sign language performers telling stories and songs along with pictures!

Featuring noted sign language performers, Signed Stories brings a great array of quality picture books to life through animations, words and signing. Readers can choose between American or British Sign Language. Available books cover a wide range of stories, from classic fairy tales and folktales to nursery rhymes and songs. The app includes a vocabulary builder and fun learning games.

Platform: iOS, Android
Grades: Elementary – Middle School
Cost: (Free app, books for purchase) 

Learn how the Oregon School for the Deaf incorporates Signed Stories into their literary activities. Scholastic mentions the app in their article “6 Fabulous Apps for Special Needs.” And check out this review of the app from OMazing Kids.

Watch the app in action here:

In June, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their Best Apps for Teaching and Learning 2018. The apps encourage qualities such as creativity and collaboration and encourage discovery and curiosity.

This app can be helpful in so many ways, especially for people experiencing difficulties with vision! It can read you a document or a book, distinguish money, recognize people’s faces, and more.

“The AI in Seeing AI stands for artificial intelligence. This Microsoft app is translating a visual world into words for people with visual difficulties. Documents, products, scenes, people, colors, money, and handwriting are some of the settings offered in this app. Scenes and people are described along with information like relative location and distance. Microsoft has put accessibility in a pocket-sized format in this powerful tool for iPhones.”

Platform: iOS
Grades: All
Cost: FREE

Seeing AI is included in this article of ways to incorporate artificial intelligence into the classroom. This post from NVIDIA gets into the way the app was developed and shares some real-world situations in which the app is helpful. Finally, this article from Perkins School for the Blind breaks down each category of the app and includes a video along with a description.

Watch this video and see how the app works!

In June, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their Best Apps for Teaching and Learning 2018. The apps encourage qualities such as creativity and collaboration and encourage discovery and curiosity.

This app allows students to animate their own creations. It also records voice, so the possibilities for fun projects are endless!

PuppetMaster is an intuitive animation app for kids, where learners can bring to life any image, just by acting things out in front of the camera. Voice is also recorded resulting in an animated video. PuppetMaster encourages the creation of visual art in any medium as well as active storytelling and sharing.

Platform: iOS
Grades: Preschool – Middle School
Cost: $2.99

PuppetMaster has an Education Suite full of lesson plans that are aligned with Common Core and ISTE standards.  And if you don’t see what you’re looking for, you can send in a request for them to create a lesson or project for you!

This detailed review from School Library Journal gives more information about the app and even includes a video interview with the app’s creator! And the app is included in this list from Practical Ed Tech all about using free tools to create animated videos

Watch this quick video to see all the fun ways this app works:

In June, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their Best Apps for Teaching and Learning 2018. The apps encourage qualities such as creativity and collaboration and encourage discovery and curiosity.

This app is designed to get students engaged in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals from the UN. Through this app, students can connect and take actions to support the goals themselves.

“In 2015, the United Nations developed its 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the world’s “to-do list” designed to “end poverty, reduce inequalities, and tackle climate change.” This app offers detailed background and current awareness about all the goals–including targets, videos, news, updates and facts and figures and supporting student engagement and action on the goals that speak loudest to them. The app facilitates discovery of local efforts, the ability to connect with others in sustainable actions and events, and allow students to create their own actions.”

Platform: iOS, Android
Grades: Middle School – Adult
Cost: FREE

The website Teach SDGs has an entire blog and page of resources to help educators incorporate the goals of the 2030 Agenda into their classroom activities. This article from Education Week written by a high school curriculum specialist offers some ideas for incorporating the Development Goals into your classroom activities.

Watch this video to see how the app works!

In June, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their Best Apps for Teaching and Learning 2018. The apps encourage qualities such as creativity and collaboration and encourage discovery and curiosity.

***NOTE: this app is scheduled to shut down on June 30th, 2019. However, it was included on the list of Best Apps 2018 so we wanted to share it with you anyway. Synth is the app that is the next step for this company. Synth provides “interactive podcasts in byte-size increments.”

“Recap is a free student video response and reflection app that gives teachers and parents insight into students’ learning and progress. Recap provides evidence of student thinking, improves formative assessment, and supports personalized learning.”

Platform: iOS, Android
Grades: All
Cost: FREE

Hear from this teacher who uses Recap in her ESL classroom as a way to encourage participation from quiet or shy students. Ed Tech Teacher has this post explaining how the app works well with Chromebooks and also offers some suggestions for classroom activities.

Here’s a quick video to see how the app works: