iPad For Music Education

Karajan - This is a great app (named after Herbert von Karajan who was an Austrian orchestra and opera conductor) and will be brilliant for learning music theory like I did in school, but instead of the teacher sitting at a piano (or worse, glockenspiel...) and playing intervals, this app can be given to the kids and they can work at their own pace.

It's basically all aural lessons like intervals, chords, scales, key signatures, pitch and tempo and you can make it as easy or as hard as you

want. The app gives a representation of a piano or a guitar fret board if you want it. I tried the free iPhone version and it was simple and excellent. The full iPad app costs $12.99 but I think it will be well worth it.

Here is a video of it in action:

Guitar Lab - This is a free app that is kind of like a lite version of a series of apps called "50 Guitar Licks You Must Know" like Rock and Blues. It's for guitarists and shows lots of basic and expert guitar riffs that all observe different guitar techniques from different genres with full, patient video tutorials. This app is a catalogue of sorts but has about 8 lessons from each of the genres on offer and the lessons are pretty great as they are videos of a teacher explaining it complete with on screen graphics of what's happening. These other apps are $5.99 each in the app store.

Newzik HD - This is an interesting free app. It could have lots of potential. Watch the video of what this app is all about here.

It should give you an idea of what it does. Only thing is it doesn't have tabs on the app and the such, it uses tabs from various websites so I'm guessing it might be a little hit and miss in terms of good, accurate tabs/notes. The streaming/sharing of the sheet music is very cool though if it works.

Note Perfect! - This is a free iPhone/iPod Touch app I found, it's a simple little game where you get an image of sheet music on the screen (bass, treble...) and you have to choose what note comes up on the scale. It's pretty good for learning notes in a fun way. It can get interesting in the harder difficulty where the notes are several lines above the five normal lines.

One High Schools' Plan for an iPad rollout

A Florida high school is preparing its IT infrastructure for the implementation of a rollout of iPads to its year 9-12 students.

The school, is working to address issues of security and wireless network capabilities, as well as whether to use Apple's new iCloud Web-based storage system for the implementation of over 300 iPads.

Read the issues the school is working through at Bridget McCrea's article 'Prepping for a Fall iPad rollout' at The Journal.
Image couresy of : 'Apple iPad WiFi' + 3G by liewcf

Create your own iPad arena

Engage your students imagination and creativity with this idea to create your own mini ipad concert theatre. Get them to brainstorm other arenas they could create incorporating the ipad.
What about a stadium of Blues fans watching NSW winning State of Origin!



For more information see this post about Gary Katz and his wonderful creations.

Poetry immersion on the iPad

T.S Elliots poem 'The Waste Land' becomes an immersive experience on the iPad. with readings by various actors and poets, a video performance of the poem, explanatory notes about the poems references and allusions. Students can see the original manuscript and the editing notes and view a gallery of images that influenced the creation of the poem. $16.99



Poetry Everywhere (free)
If students think poetry is old fashioned and not relevant to them introduce them to the Poetry Everywhere app. This is a collection of short poetry videos featuring contemporary poets reading their own works


One way of developing students understanding of poetry is to turn them into poets. The following Apps could be used:

Poetry Magnets (free)

Great tool for kids to find different ways to express themselves. Choose from a tray of words and build your poem. You can choose certain categories of words, from common to mythical to religious.

Verses - The Poetry game (free)
Verses comes with 4 banks of words,:
•Old School Words
•New School Words
•'The' Dictionary
•If Ands Or Buts Dictionary
You can email your poetry directly to your friends or save it to your iPad photo album.

Personalising Social Skills learning

The Social Skills Sampler HD application is designed to teach and reinforce basic social skills critical for independent living . It provides easy-to-understand information that allows users to become more capable of functioning independently at work, at home, and in the community.
Social Skills Sampler HD is an excellent App that can be used as a teaching tool for the purpose of making associative connections (visual clues) through video stories showing what social skills are supposed to look like so that the person with a behavioural or autism spectrum disorder can learn (by visual association) and model (by imitation) these social skills in the context of real life social scenarios.

*Contains 80 videos (examples: Meeting and Greeting people, Be polite and courteous, join others in a group, follow directions etc.
*Password-protected administration section
*Using the admin function you can tailor the videos for each user based on individual needs
*Lock the device to a particular user for ease of use
This App is free.

To access the administrator account so that you can tailor the videos to each user you need the Administrator password. This is available from their support site.
Also available from this same company is Life Skills Sampler and Work Skills Sampler both free.

Lesson plans for the iPad

Lisa Johnson has posted a really useful booklet of lesson plans for the iPad on her blog Techchef4u using FlipSnack. (Flip Snack is useful itself -it converts your PDFs into a flipping book.)

12 pages of lesson plans for the iPad covering curriculum areas of writing, research, maths, science, technology, poetry and more. This is a great resource for every teacher looking for ways to improve and engage student learning by using the iPad.

PDHPE apps integrating literacy and numeracy

PDHPE and Literacy
Eureka Sports Science (free) (Upper Primary to Secondary)
The first app I could highly recommend is the Eureka Sports Science App. I have reviewed this one previously.
This App is packed with great information to read about 5 aspects of Sports Science. It covers Medicine, Psychology, Engineering, Biology and Human Physiology. Topics like "How would your body cope in a F1 car' is presented with great graphics and interesting and useful information. Discover the success behind British cycling with an xray image of their bike where you can tap on parts of the bike to get information on the design features of all the parts of the bike.
Students could use this app as a basis for discovering information about the various aspects of sports science. For e.g

• They could compare their own heart rate after running and at rest with those of an F1 car driver
• They could explore the history of drugs in sport and compare that to today's drug in sport issues.
• Investigate why elite female athletes need different training and nutrition regimes to those of their male counterparts.

Health Facts (free) (Upper Primary to Secondary)
Health Facts provides of thousands of interesting health-related facts, useful tips, and relevant medical statistics -- concisely written for quick and easy review. To move to the next health fact just SHAKE or TAP your iPad. Example facts:

• Did you know that infectious diseases kill more people worldwide than any other single cause?
• Did you know that up to 50% of all adults snore occasionally, and about 25% are habitual snorers?
• Did you know that you can get a salmonella infection after handling pets, particularly reptiles like snakes, turtles and lizards?

This App could be used as topic starter where students would choose one of the facts and do some further research on the fact and present information their research to the class.
A limitation of this app is that you can't search for facts or go back to a fact you were interested in. You get a new fact randomly with each tap.

Destructive issues (free) (Secondary)
This app provides information to empower educate and equip students with resources an skills to help them make informed and intelligent choices about critical life issues for youth. Organised in two sections: Awareness and Response. Under Awareness are subsections Education, Q&A and Scenarios, and under Resources - Prevention, Intervention, Resources to find help.
Students could use this app as discussion starters on

• health/body related topics
• the possible outcomes from choices that they make in regards to the many issues they face in today's world.

Topics include Steroids in Athletes, Tobacco, Alcohol etc. Note the resources refer to USA websites and organisations.

200 Biomechanics Terms and Quiz ($1.19) (Secondary)
Students can use this app to learn more about Biomechanic terms. There are quiz and flashcard options.

Everyday Health
Fact filled app with Healthy tips, Health A-Z for the top 50 health conditions, Doctor Q&A, Pharmacist Q&A. Mom Says, Food and Fitness.
Students can use this to

• look holistically at the many issues that can affect your body
• evaluate research information provided on this site with further research via other authoritiative websites.
• finally they can have fun checking whether the things their Mum tells them to do when they are sick have any medical/scientific value to them. For example 'Does Chicken Soup' help a cough.

PDHPE and Numeracy

TimeMotion (free) (Upper Primary to Secondary)
This app allows the user to record the time, type and movement of an athlete during a game. To save the data just take a screenshot (press the Home and Sleep buttons at the same time), or email the results via the Share button. Coaches can even use TimeMotion to track the time in possession of the ball and the frequency of possessions for their team or individual players.

• Students can use this ap to organise and record information or interpret data presented in a table.

DailyBurn (free) (Upper Primary to Secondary)
Daily Burn provide to track nutrition and exercise. DailyBurn has a searchable food database to track your food intake as well as a a range of exercises you can choose to set up a training plan.
Students can use this app to :

• Explore the dietary habits of young people in relation to the recommended dietary guidelines for children and adolescents.

Use this app with The NSW DET PDHPE link "Dietary requirements of Adolescents" which provides a useful teaching strategy for incoroporating numeracy.

For more PDHPE apps see the website " The physical education teacher"