We’ve talked about why it makes sense to use mobile apps to enhance our children’s education and how to keep them safe online. Now it’s time to talk about how to practically incorporate these fun educational apps into a typical school day.
This can be done whether you homeschool your child, or work on homework with him after school, or are looking for some beneficial distractions for her while you run errands or attend after-school events and lessons.
Educational apps can enhance your child’s education no matter your particular circumstances!
Here are 5 ways to begin using mobile apps to further your child’s education:
1. Move games and other fluff into folders on your device (or remove them altogether) so that your child can focus on the fun apps that actually serve a purpose – engaging his mind and furthering his education.
2. Bring your smartphone or ipad with you when you run errands, go to doctor’s appointments, music lessons, and sports practice. Let your child know which apps she may play with. Load up your ipad with a good amount of apps available on topics such as math, science, language arts, etc. You may even want to keep a nice selection of picture books available. Check our website for apps in all of the above categories and more. Your child will not get bored with these.
3. Start, or break-up, your day with a fun educational video, such as BrainPop. This is a good way to learn something new in an entertaining way.
4. Use apps for reference, such as WordBook to look up the definition of a word; WorldBook: This Day in History to find out what important events happened on this day in history; MyCalculator to figure out a difficult problem (if calculators are acceptable for your child’s math level); or GeoWalk to find a particular location on the globe.
5. Use your mobile device to read books and listen to audiobooks. We are reading through the Bible this year using Bible Is and use the Kindle and iBooks apps for other books we are reading-aloud. This way, we can take several books with us on one small portable device.
And finally, here is a great tip for classroom teachers! Some apps, such as iLiveMath and iLiveGrammar can be connected to a VGA adapter and projected to a screen so that you can use it for your entire class and everyone will be on the same page (so to speak).
Alternatively, if you have more than one iPad available for your classroom, you may want to check into the volume discounts (up to 50%) available through Apple’s Volume Purchase program.
Stay tuned for next week when we suggest 5 more ways to incorporate these fun and educational apps into your school day. And don’t forget to sign up for our iPad drawing held in less than 1 week!
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 25th, 2011 at 8:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
