These apps facilitate communication among students, between instructor and students, or between the students/faculty and the world. Whether your goal is to communicate meaning through content or just have a dialogue, these apps provide a great start.
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Animoto allows to create and share extraordinary videos. The online video maker turns your photos, video clips, and music into video in minutes.
Platform(s): Android, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Web-based
Cost: Free (Limited version); $5/month (Plus version); $39/month (Pro version)
Web Resources: Animoto, iTunes, Google Play
Ideas for Educational Use: Consider using Animoto to help create videos for a flipped classroom or video content for your online course.
Tips and Considerations: N/A
Start blogging on the go. With Blogger, you can: compose a post that you can save as a draft or immediately publish; view a list of your saved and published posts; switch account/blog if you have more than one; embed an image from the gallery, or, by taking a picture directly from the app; add labels to your posts; and add location information.
Platform(s): Android, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Web-based
Cost: Free
Web Resources: Blogger, iTunes, Google Play
Ideas for Educational Use: Encourage students to blog from events and environments relevant to your course.
Tips and Considerations: On the initial login page for Blogger, enter your full NSCC email and leave the password field blank before pressing the "Sign-in" button. This will provide another login portal that resembles Pipeline. Use your regular NSCC username and password to login here.
Educreations is an app that turns your iPad into a recordable whiteboard for creating tutorials.
Platform(s): iPad
Cost: Free
Web Resources: Educreations, iTunes
Ideas for Educational Use: This app allows you to: create quick video tutorials, explain formulas, develop animated lessons, and comment on photos.
Tips and Considerations: With the latest version, you can use an erase tool, restart recordings without losing work, and login with Facebook or Google accounts.
"Stay connected and share life as it happens with Google+. Join a Hangout, post a photo, or see what friends are sharing while you're on the go."
Platform(s): Android, iPad, iPhone, Web-based
Cost: Free
Web Resources: Google, iTunes, Google Play
Ideas for Educational Use: Use Hangouts and Circles for class collaboration activities.
Tips and Considerations: Use your NSCC login information to access. Use Picassa for unlimited storage. Use the YouTube search box within to search for YouTube videos.
"Hangouts brings one-on-one and group conversations to life with photos, emoji, and video calls for free. Connect with friends across computers, phones and tablets."
Platform(s): Android, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Web-based
Cost: Free
Web Resources: Google, iTunes, Google Play
Ideas for Educational Use: Instructors can teach to multiple locations at the same time.
Tips and Considerations: Do trial runs with Google Hangouts before holding a session.
Haiku Deck is a completely new kind of presentation software designed to make your slides stunning. Whether you are pitching an idea, teaching a lesson, delivering a keynote, or igniting a movement, Haiku Deck makes presentations simple, beautiful, and fun.
Platform(s): iPad
Cost: Free
Web Resources: Haiku Deck, iTunes
Ideas for Educational Use: Create simple, clear, and consistent slides for classroom presentation or to further illustrate course topics.
Tips and Considerations: Users can share their presentations out to social networks or blogs, even as PowerPoint or Keynote presentations.
"ipadio is the easiest and fastest way to create and share audio. Use this free app to record and upload audio to the Web."
Platform(s): Android, iPad
Cost: Free
Web Resources: ipadio, iTunes, Google Play
Ideas for Educational Use: Create on-the-fly audio to share out to your students from live events, interviews, or other activities. Provide an audio tour for them of a facility or encourage them to "report" from a course-related event for their classmates.
Tips and Considerations: N/A
iTranslate is an award-winning translation tool that helps you break down language barriers. With its state of the art technology, you can speak any language in a second.
Platform(s): Android, iPad, iPhone
Cost: Free
Web Resources: iTranslate, iTunes, Google Play
Ideas for Educational Use: Give students primary sources in their original language and ask them translate and make sense of the material. This is a great app for History, Literature, Compostion, ESL, and even speech courses.
Tips and Considerations: N/A
"Moldiv lets you combine and edit multiple photos to make amazing collages. This app has fantastic frames and lots of professional editing options. It offers awesome photo effects and great decoration features like text captions and numerous stamps. Make your stories in Moldiv and share them on your favorite social media networks including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram."
Platform(s): iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch
Cost: Free
Web Resources: iTunes
Ideas for Educational Use: Students can make a collage to demonstrate understanding of a concept or create a visual narrative of a process. Students can also capture the moments of a particular event or activity.
Tips and Considerations: N/A
"Create and present beautiful presentations with Prezi for iPad. Get started by choosing one of our stunning templates then add your text and images. Pinch to zoom on topics, retouch your prezis and adjust your presentations on the move."
Platform(s): iPad, iPhone, Web-based
Cost: Free
Ideas for Educational Use: Use Prezi to create presentations with more visual impact and effects for your courses.
Tips and Considerations: N/A
This app is a recordable whiteboard. You can write your ideas and share them. ScreenChomp records your touchscreen interactions and audio.
Platform(s): iPad
Cost: Free
Web Resources: Tech Smith, iTunes
Ideas for Educational Use: Use the whiteboard to explain a difficult concept and share with students.
Tips and Considerations: N/A
With Skitch, you can annotate images and documents with arrows, stamps, shapes, text, and more. Use Skitch to markup a PDF, snap your screen, annotate a photo, or create something new with a blank canvas.
Platform(s): Android, iPad, iPhone iPod Touch, Web-based
Cost: Free
Web Resources: Evernote's Skitch, iTunes, Google Play
Ideas for Educational Use: Quickly focus on what's important using annotation and markup. You can make your point with shapes, arrows, and quick sketches. Use Skitch on your desktop and phone to give feedback and share ideas.
Tips and Considerations: This app works with Evernote.
Snapchat is a way to share moments with friends. "Snap a picture or a video, add a caption, and send it to a friend. They'll receive it, and then the snap disappears. You control how long your friends can view your message -- simply set the timer up to ten seconds and send."
Platform(s): Android, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch
Cost: Free
Web Resources: Snapchat, iTunes, Google Play
Ideas for Educational Use: A great way to send a photo of an example you want students to see.
Tips and Considerations: Screenshots can be captured if it is done quick. The sender will be notified if it is detected that you have taken a screenshot.
This is a smart classroom response system that empowers teachers to engage their classrooms through a series of educational exercises and games via smartphones, laptops, and tablets.
Platform(s): Android, iPad, iPhone, Web-based
Cost: Free (with registration)
Web Resources: Socrative, iTunes, Google Play
Ideas for Educational Use: Engage the class by making thinking visible. Capture data. Save time on grading. You can see how well the class understands your presentation immediately.
Tips and Considerations: Socrative takes 3 minutes for you to setup and 30 seconds for your students to load.
"Storify lets you create social stories by browsing social media streams and dragging-and-dropping photos, videos and updates into a story, along with adding your own text. Now, you can use your fingers to combine social media from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to tell a story from the iPad."
Platform(s): iPad, Web-based
Cost: Free
Web Resources: Storify, iTunes
Ideas for Educational Use: Drag and drop status updates, photos or videos to bring together the social media elements that will best illustrate a story. Your story is always editable, so you can pull in the latest from the social Web.
Tips and Considerations: Storify stories can be embedded anywhere on the Web by simply pasting and embedding the code. It works similar to embedding video.
"Vine is an app owned by Twitter that enables its users to create and post short video clips with a maximum clip length of six seconds and can be shared or embedded on social networking services."
Platform(s): Android, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Windows
Cost: Free
Web Resources: Vine, iTunes, Google Play, Windows Phone
Ideas for Educational Use: Pair with information on a class website or blog. Other ways to use Vine include: announce homework to students; model how students should execute a task; market upcoming events to followers; film solutions to math problems; identify symbols and silent metaphor.
Tips and Considerations: App users must be at least 17 years old.
"Voice Record Pro is a professional voice recorder. It allows you to record voice memos and on-site sounds at unlimited length with configurable quality."
Platform(s): iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch
Cost: Free
Web Resources: iTunes
Ideas for Educational Use: Great for recordings, such as a lecture and to share on a Dropbox.
Tips and Considerations: There is no advertisement for a charge. Recorded audio files can play on any operating system. You can share voice memo by email or transfer audio files to your computer (PC/Mac) using USB. An iTunes account is required.
"An interactive, collaboration and sharing tool that enables users to add images, documents, and videos, and to which other users can add voice, text, audio file, or video comments. You can post your VoiceThread on your website or save it to an MP3 or DVD."
Platform(s): iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch
Cost: Free
Web Resources: VoiceThread, iTunes
Ideas for Educational Use: It's the perfect tool for creating multimedia presentations in a relatively short time frame. It prompts students to think carefully about what they are going to say before recording themselves. The power of peer feedback and peer review is intuitively available to all participants in a VoiceThread conversation.
Tips and Considerations: VoiceThread does not allow multiple users to have simultaneous access to the same account. It may be necessary for an entire class to use a single class account login. As a result, students could remove or change comments made by others or inadvertently delete an entire VoiceThread. It could present an accessibility problem for some users.
