Top Mobile Apps

1. Google Translate: iPhone and Android FREE. Google Translate can take typed phrases, spoken words and even real-world text (like street signs) and transform them into other languages. Google translate is used in my classroom daily. I have four ELL learners, two of which have a very hard time with English. We use Google Translate to help them understand what I am saying and so I know what they are saying back to me.

2. Quik: iPhone and Android FREE. Quik is an automatic video editing app. It was rebranded just this year by the company GoPro. Quik takes a bunch of your video footage, identifies the best moments automatically, and sets the whole thing to mood-appropriate music. It’s a great way to add a professional-looking touch to your recordings before putting them on Facebook, YouTube or Instagram. This can be used in education when learners are making videos documenting their learning edit and bring content together quickly and easily.  We use YouTube a lot to put student work on display and content can easily be uploaded to YouTube from Quik.

3. Day One: iPhone $4.99. Day One is a journaling app that allows you to write quick thoughts as well as a photo every day. The amazing part is that it is backed up through the cloud so you can forever have your reflections, thoughts, and photos. I can see this being utilized for morning work in the education world with learners or as a reflection tool for me as a lead learner (teacher). 

4. Boomerang: iPhone and Android FREE. Boomerang takes a series of still photos and transforms it into a short looping video. The end result is somewhere between a GIF and a stop-motion movie. I can see this app being used in a literacy class to create and tell a story or in science class to sequence events in an experiment.

5. Swift Playgrounds: iPhone FREE. Swift Playgrounds challenges participants to input strings of characters written in Apple's Swift language to complete puzzles. Aspiring developers can also write their own code in a blank document and export it into Xcode, Apple's software for creating apps. Learners at my school love code.org and learning how to code. My son who is in third grade loves Tynker and I am certain he would enjoy Swift Playgrounds as well.