Touring the Educational Apps on iTunes

This week I was busy downloading education apps for my iPad, and I found some useful ones for my students.

Speech with Milo is fabulous. It is a speech therapy tool for children, but it is also a good tool for teaching language development and reading skills to children. I think it would work well for students who are hard to engage or for teaching concepts that are difficult to articulate. It helps students develop basic language building skills, and it ties in well with what we're learning in our literacy class. It also emphasizes storytelling, which is great because it teaches sequencing and it's interactive! Did I mention that the little mouse acts out adjectives and verbs? I'm a pretty big fan of this app.

I'm wondering how I would use this app in the classroom. I can see the benefit for one on one instruction with kids, but if every student doesn't have an ipad in front of them, how would I make this work?

I also discovered some Special Education Apps that can really benefit students with visual, hearing, and/or speaking challenges, and they also account for different learning styles. They have apps in categories that are broken down for communication, emotional development, seeing & hearing, language development, etc. What is completely baffling to me is the price tag of each app. The first one listed is close to $200. Not doable on a students salary, and I suspect not on a teacher's salary either. I wonder why is it so expensive? But, how big of a difference might this make for students with learning or social disabilities who aren't getting the one on one support they need?

I'm currently browsing through the Apps for Teachers and I'm seeing plenty of whiteboard apps that are reminiscent of Mrs. North's portable whiteboard tool. Also, Toontastic is a tool where students can create their own stories, and narrate the stories themselves. It has a few rave reviews from teachers, but it also sounds like they work in schools where each student has an ipad. Again, I'm wondering how this might work if we didn't have enough ipads to go around- but it's still fun to think about the possibilities and the potential for apps in the classroom.