iPad Reviews

"Building Titanic"
The first app that I checked out an app about the Titanic. I chose it because the Titanic is something I am interested in, but history itself is not, so I wanted to see if it helped me learn.  Surprisingly, it was very interesting.  Although there was no cool game or actual contruction piece, the images caught my attention and made me want to click on things to read about what they were.  They were real authentic images from the ship.  There was a ton of information on each of the spots I clicked on, and a lot of the facts were things that were not necessarily things you would find in a text book.  Very cool app.  I do believe that this app, a long with others of its types, could help kids who were like me and did not like history so much but could get interested and curious about the photos.

"Show Me"
The second app that I looked into was one that was a sort of virtual white board.  At first I felt like it would not be any more useful than a sheet of paper or a regular white board, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized its usefulness.  White boards, smart boards, and even traditional chalk boards are all very useful; they alow a teacher to have a visual example.  But what happens when you need a visual example while you are on a field trip? Or outside doing an experiment?  What if just one child needed help? It would not be very convenient to interrupt a whole class of working children just to show one child examples on the board.  It would, however, be very handy to whip out this app and be able to show things right there beside the child.  In addition, it is was more environmentally efficient that grabbing a piece of paper and pencil for every single thing you needed to draw.  Instead, you could just show one things, erase it, and mover onto the next, conveniently anywhere you really needed it.  Lastly, all the drawings and writings can be saved.  So, if by some chance a teacher needed to draw a very important diagram about the experiment they were doing, by clicking save, they always have it to refer to or even load and print, without having to draw it every single time.  Simple, but nifty.