Preparation

Out of the Preparation section I was able to look at the Grammar Express and the Dictionary app and was very impressed with both of them.  The Grammar Express app would be very useful to either a class or to individual students.  If used as a class it would allow the teacher to evaluate the students understanding of the different parts of speech.  I could easily see a teacher assigning these lessons and tests to a group and then monitoring their accuracy.  If a student missed more than a certain percentage then the teacher could adjust a lesson if too many students missed it or remedial work if only a few.  And this would be the other use for this App, the individual student.  A student or several students could be given certain parts of speech depending on the deficiency.  Or just as a matter of review a teacher could assign aspects of the application for different students.  Differentiated work is, for me, one of the most difficult things to do in a class.  There are always those students who pick up different aspects at different rates.  This application could give an English teacher a very powerful tool to help individualize the lessons and still monitor the students progress.  This was the most important aspect to me, the ability to monitor their progress.  I did not find a function that would all the results to be exported as perhaps an email to the teacher, but it would not too difficult for a teacher to still go back and check what was missed on the test.  And using the ability to review would allow the instructor to see if there was a consistent problem.  I really only had time to review the verb portion of the application, so I am assuming the other parts of speech section are the basically the same. 

I am not a English teacher, but it seemed that it was aimed at the Middle grades, perhaps 5th - 9th grade.  I would hope that by 9th grade a student would definitely know the grammar rules that were covered by Grammar Express, but if they didn't then this would be great tool for a self-study to help that student get caught up.   The fact that after the test the student not only gets to see the mistake, but also a short explanation would add to its effectiveness.

Dictionary is an excellent reference tool.  I would say that it is like having a full size dictionary sitting right next to you, but it is much better.  To be honest it is like having the smartest kid in your class sitting right next to you and he/she doesn't mind helping you out.  Being a terrible speller the fact that it starts showing the choices of words as soon as you start typing is a huge help.   This is the first way that Dictionary is a step above.  It does not force you to do a search with the exact spelling of the word.  The memory of recently searched words and the pronunciations for all of the words could be very useful.  The thesaurus is a huge added bonus to the program.   It does what any dictionary should do, with some very important pluses.  The word of the day rounds out the application and make is it a very useful tool.  Certainly better than just using the internet for a word search.


I did not get to look at the Photoshop app as much as I would like to, but from what I saw it was effective.  It is certainly not as powerful as the complete Photoshop application, it is correctly named Photoshop express.  If a student needed to do major photo editing I don't think that I would recommend this application, but for a tablet it seemed to have all of the normal functions.  There was the crop function as well as flip or rotate the picture.  There were some effects also available, borders, tint contrast and black and white.  There were some special effects built into the program as well.  With this program is is possible to change the appearance of the picture itself.  It also allows for importing pictures as well as taking the picture with the device. 

There is one more important aspect of this review that I would like to point out.  I did some searching that the cost of this application is $3.99.  Compare this to the cost of Adobe Photoshop Element 11 which is more than $100.  It is certainly true that the $100 program will do more than the $4 application, but for 99.9% of the people that use tablets the Photoshop Express will do more than enough of photo editing.   It could make a very nice edition to a students presentation.

 I really enjoyed the Story Kit app.  It gave the choice of creating a new story or editing an existing story.  I think that the students would love to write their own stories using there own pictures or drawings, their choice.  Also to add the sound to it so that it would be an audio book would be great.  I could see this being used as an assignment or as a reward for a younger student.  From what I saw it seemed very easy to create the story.  The kids could either act out the pictures or draw them, either one would add to the kids enjoyment.  I did not notice if there was a print function, but I would imagine that there would be.  It wouldn't be critical, but if iPad is part of a classroom set then to print out the picture would be helpful.  I did see on the video that there is some difficulty in recording.  It was not insurmountable, but it would definitely take some teachers assistance.  I could see this being a huge determent for some teachers using this function.  But even if you didn't use this part of the application young students would certainly enjoy writing their own "books".  The ability of edit an existing book would also allow for some creativity for a group of students.