1. 21 Good iPad Apps for Middle School Students Richard Byrne iPadApps4School.com

2. Phraseology Phraseology is an iPad app that doesn’t look like much more than a simple word processing app until you explore all of its handy little features. Phraseology provides a clean interface for creating documents. Once you’ve started creating a document you can take advantage of helpful editing and analysis tools built into the Phraseology app. Those tools include highlighting of the parts of speech in your document, a reading level indicator, and text arrangement tools. When you have a document open in the Phraseology app you can tap a “target” icon to have nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, prepositions, and conjunctions highlighted throughout your document. You can choose to have one or all of those parts of speech highlighted in your document. Tap the “i” icon while viewing your document and you will see an analysis of the reading level of your document, a word count, and a break-down of the frequency with which you used the various parts of speech in your document. Rearranging the text in your document is a simple matter of choosing a line and dragging it up or down (cut and paste is not required).Phraseology

3. Word Mover Word Mover is a free iPad app produced by Read Write Think. The app is designed to help students develop poems and short stories. When students open the Word Mover app they are shown a selection of words that they can drag onto a canvas to construct a poem or story. Word Mover provides students with eight canvas backgrounds on which they can construct their poems. If the word bank provided by Word Mover doesn’t offer enough words they can add their own words to the word bank. Word MoverWord Mover could be a great app for students to use to as a story or poem starter. The app reminds me a bit of those refrigerator magnets that were popular for a while about ten years ago. You know, the ones that had individual words on them that you dragged around to create funny sentences. The same idea can be applied to Word Mover.

4. Shake-a-Phrase Shake-a-Phrase is a fun iPad app for elementary school and middle school students to use to start stories and practice recognizing parts of speech. Shake-a-Phrase has three basic modes; shake it, story starter, and quiz mode. Each mode has five themes; animals, monsters, fairytales, sports, and random. In “shake it” mode students shake their iPads to have complete, but random sentences appear on their screens. The “story starter” mode presents students with a new random story prompt each time they shake their iPads. In both of these modes students can favorite sentences and prompts to refer to later. Shake-a-Phrase’s quiz mode presents students with random sentences in which they have to identify nouns, adjectives, verbs, conjunctions, and prepositions. Students will enjoy using Shake-a-Phrase, in part, because of the physical act of shaking their iPads to start a story. They’ll also enjoy it because of the fun sentences that are generated by the app. If you only have one iPad in your classroom, consider using Shake-a-Phrase as a story prompt generator. Each you use it you could have a different student take a turn shaking the iPad. Just make sure you have a good case on that iPad first.Shake-a-Phrase

5. Visual Poetry Visual Poetry is a nice iPad app for creating custom word clouds. The app’s name implies that it only works for poetry, but it will work with any text that you write. Visual Poetry allows you to choose from a menu of word cloud shapes. If the shapes in the menu aren’t quite what you’re after, you can draw your own shapes to use for your word clouds. Visual Poetry provides a wide selection of font styles, font colors, and background colors. By default Visual Poetry makes the most common words the largest, but you can make other words the featured words by simply typing them into your word clouds. Word clouds can be useful in helping students identify the words that are emphasized in a written article or a speech. After creating their word clouds ask your students to think about why the author or speaker used some words so frequently. Word clouds can also be used to help students see which words that they have frequently used in their own works. Have your students create word clouds of their work during the revision process of writing a story or essay. The word cloud will quickly show students which words they have used a lot. Then ask them to think about synonyms for the words that they have used most often in their writing.

6. Street Food Carts Street Food Carts is a free iPad app in which students run their own street food cart businesses. In the game students choose the location for their food carts and the type of foods and beverages to offer for sale. To run a successful business students have to account for things like weather and location. After selecting a location and food cart students have to buy ingredients and set prices for their offerings. Players who are successful in running a food cart could make enough cash to open another one and increase their profits. Playing Street Food Carts could be a great way for middle school students to learn about basic business concepts like supply and demand and operating overhead costs.Street Food Carts

7. Make Beliefs Comix Make Beliefs Comix is a free multilingual comic strip creation tool. The best feature of the app is that it supports the creation of comics in seven languages; English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Latin. The free Make Beliefs Comix iPad app allows students to create two, three, and four panel comic strips. To create comics in the Make Beliefs Comix iPad app you simply select the number of frames you want to use then choose the characters that you want to feature in your story. After choosing your frames and characters you can type text into speech bubbles to tell your story.Make Beliefs Comix iPad app

8. Strip Designer Strip Designer is a great comic strip creation tool to add to your students’ iPads. Priced at $2.99 USD it is $2 less than Comic Life and is just as good. Strip Designer provides dozens of comic strip layouts from simple one frame comics to one page layouts in a variety of configurations to multiple page layouts there is probably a layout that works for all students. And if not, your students can create their own custom comic strip layouts in Strip Designer. Strip DesignerStrip Designer allows students to create comics from scratch by drawing pictures, taking pictures, or importing pictures. Students can import pictures from a variety of places including Facebook, Dropbox, and the camera roll on their iPads. Each frame in your students’ comic strips is created individually and is not tied to an overall theme. This means that one frame in their comic strips could be based on a photo and the next frame could be based on a drawing. The borders and shading effects for each frame can be individually adjusted too. To help students really tell stories through comics, Strip Designer offers a slew of text editing tools, digital stickers, and drawing tools.

9. Truss Me & Simple Physics Truss MeTruss Me is an iPad app that students can use to design and test simple weight-bearing structures. Truss Me can be used in “challenge” mode or in “free play” mode. The challenge mode contains fifteen activities in which students are awarded points for strength and efficiency of their structures. For example, if a structure holds the weight but uses too many parts it doesn’t receive as many points as a structure using fewer parts while supporting the same weight. Structures that won’t work at all fall apart. Simple PhysicsSimple Physics is an iPad app that presents users with fun and challenging engineering problems. The app has twelve challenges that progress in difficulty as you move through the app. The premise of each challenge is the same. The challenge is to create a structure like a bridge or staircase that can support a given amount of weight. You’re given a budget for materials for each structure and you have to stay under that budget. When your structure is complete, test it to find out if it will work.

10. MoMA Art Lab The MoMA Art Lab is a free iPad app that elementary school and middle school students can use to learn about art and create art of their own. On the app students can learn about the processes artists use and how artists use shapes and colors to create art. After seeing how artists create art students can try their hands at creating drawings, paintings, collages, shape poems, and a half dozen other forms of art.MoMA Art Lab To access the examples of art and learn about them students should tap on the activities icon in the MoMA Art Lab app. Students who need assistance with reading the text on a page in the app can tap the sound icon to hear the text read aloud. After reading about or listening to the information about the sample art, students then try to create the same type of art themselves.MoMA Art Lab

11. Math 42 Math 42 is a neat iPad app that is one part calculator and one part mathematics tutorial. When students enter an equation into Math 42 they not only receive the answer they also receive a break-down of the steps needed in order to solve the equation. Along with an illustration of the steps students can see alternative approaches to solving a problem. Math 42Math 42 is designed to handle mathematics problems commonly found in math curricula for fifth through twelfth grade. Math 42 works offline and does not require students to register for the service.

12. Stick Around Stick Around is an iPad app developed by Tony Vincent and Morris Cooke (the developer of the popular Explain Everything app). Stick Around gets its name of the sticker element of the app. The app contains educational puzzles that students solve by dragging stickers into the correct locations on the puzzles. The puzzles are essentially matching activities that can be customized by the teachers. The best aspect of the app is that teachers can create their own puzzles.Tony Vincent Stick AroundStick Around contains eight sample puzzles. The sample puzzles can actually be played by students, but they seem to be included more as models of what teachers can create with the app. To create a puzzle in Stick Around start by selecting a puzzle format (columns, timeline, sequencing, size arrangement, Venn diagram). After choosing a format you can import a picture or draw a background for the puzzle. The puzzle is then built on top of your chosen background. Write your question and place them on the puzzle. Your answer key is created by creating stickers that your students will have to drag into place on your puzzle.

13. Thinking Blocks Thinking Blocks is a series of free iPad apps based on the web tool of the same name. The apps are designed to help students develop models of word problems. In each of the apps students create block models to work through a series of progressively more difficult word problems. As students work through the problems they are provided with feedback as to whether or not they are using the correct sequence to solve each problem. There are templates and problems for addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, and ratios. You can find links to all of the apps on the Thinking Blocks site.web tool of the same nameThinking Blocks site

14. Chromatik Chromatik is a free iPad app that makes it fun to learn and practice new music. Chromatik offers recordings of popular songs along with the sheet music to play them on more than a dozen instruments. The recordings and sheet music are yours to use for seven days. Chromatik includes an option to make a recording of your playing of a song. You can share highlights of your recordings with others through email, Facebook, and Twitter. Chromatik does require you to have an email address and some of the songs may not be appropriate for students younger than high school (the songs are all hits you’ve heard on the radio, but that doesn’t mean you want 12 year olds playing them in your school). A classroom- friendly of Chromatik is offered to schools. That version requires a $3.99 in-app purchase to unlock all of the features.That version

15. Vocabulary.com for iPad Through the Vocabulary.com iPad app students can access hundreds of lists of SAT, GRE, and other test prep words. Students can also use the app to can find vocabulary lists that are attached to novels, historical documents, famous speeches, and current news articles.iPad app When you sign up for Vocabulary.com you will be given an assessment quiz in order to give you suggested lists with which to start your practice. After completing the assessment you can use the practice lists suggested by Vocabulary.com or choose your own lists from the huge gallery of vocabulary lists.Vocabulary.com One of the aspects of the Vocabulary.com activities that I like is the instant feedback for every practice question a student attempts. Vocabulary.com has an optional competition aspect to it. Students can play for their schools and climb the Vocabulary.com leaderboard.Vocabulary.com leaderboard

16. Tynker The Tynker iPad app features stories that students animate by completing a series of programming challenges. The programming happens by organizing a series of blocks that represent commands. In that way it is similar to apps like Daisy the Dinosaur and MIT’s App Inventor. The Tynker iPad app provides the first story / programming challenge for free. The subsequent challenges require in-app purchases. The first story contains twenty challenges for students. The Tynker iPad app could be a good one for elementary school students to use to begin to learn about the logic that is used in programming. Students older than ten or eleven may find the challenges too simple.Tynker iPad appDaisy the DinosaurMIT’s App InventorTynker iPad app

17. Write About This Write About This is an iPad app (free and paid versions available) containing visual, text, voice writing prompts for students. Students can respond to the writing prompts they see by writing directly in the app or anywhere else that you want them to write. Write About This allows students and teachers to create their own writing prompts too. To create a writing prompt you choose picture from your camera roll, type a prompt, then record your voice to go along with the prompt. Prompts and responses to prompts can be shared via email. Sharing via email is disabled by default. Sharing can be activated in the app’s settings. The free version of Write About This contains 50 prompts. The paid version of Write About This (currently priced at $3.99) has nearly 500 prompts.free versionpaid version of Write About This

18. KIDS DISCOVER KIDS DISCOVER currently offers fourteen iPad apps for students. The latest KIDS DISCOVER app is about the U.S. Civil War. The content of the app is far superior to the Civil War section of any middle school or elementary school social studies textbooks that I’ve seen. In the app students can read text, listen to audio of things like the Gettysburg Address, and manipulate 3-D objects. The app also includes videos, cartoons, and plenty of historical imagery. Students can tap the images to learn more about the people and places pictured. After working through all of the chapters of the app students can test their knowledge with review quizzes and puzzles.latest KIDS DISCOVER app

19. Think Fast About the Past Think Fast About the Past is a free iPad game about U.S. history. This free iPad app is the companion to the Mission U.S. website that offers interactive journeys through U.S. history.Think Fast About the Past contains two “missions” for students to complete. The first mission is set in Boston in 1770. The mission is to find the mission dog named thimble before time expires. To find Thimble students have to correctly answer a series of questions about political and social topics of the 1770′s and 1780′s. For example, one question asks students how women supported the American Revolution. The second mission in Think Fast About the Past is set in Kentucky in 1850. In this mission students have to answer a series of questions about slavery, abolition, and the Civil War. The object is to answer all of the questions correctly in five minutes or less.Mission U.S.Think Fast About the PastThink Fast About the Past

20. Storehouse Storehouse is an iPad app for visual storytelling with your pictures and video clips. The basic idea behind Storehouse is to create stories by combining images, text, and video clips on a blank canvas. To create your stories you can import pictures and video from your iPad’s camera roll, from Instagram, from Dropbox, and from Flickr. You can arrange the sequence of the media by dragging and dropping it into place. You can add text above and below each picture or video clip in your story. Completed Storehouse stories can be shared via email, Facebook, and Twitter. Stories published through Storehouse are given their own URLs for online viewing. You can see my sample story here.see my sample story here StorehouseStorehouse could be a good app for students to use to develop visual stories about themselves, about field trips, or about school events like winter carnival day or other celebrations. As your students create their stories encourage them to think about the sequencing their media to support the narratives of their stories.

21. Rocket Science 101 Rocket Science 101 is a free iPad app offered by NASA. The app is designed to help students understand how rockets work and understand the differences between the four types of rockets most frequently used by NASA. In Rocket Science 101 students can build all four rockets in a jigsaw-like activity then virtually launch their rockets. When the rockets are launched students see the timing of each stage of the launch from surface to orbit. After playing with the four types of rockets students can try their hands at matching rockets to real NASA missions. In the challenges students read about a NASA mission then have to select the rocket that can carry the payload and travel the distance required to complete the mission. Rocket Science 101Rocket Science 101 could be a good app for students in grades five through eight to use to begin to understand some basic physics concepts associated with space exploration.

22. Mysteries of the Unseen World Mysteries of the Unseen World is a free iPad app based on the National Geographic film of the same name. In the free iPad app students see common, everyday objects under an electron microscope. The app contains three types of games based on the electron microscope images. The “solve” games show students an image and a clue as to which object they are seeing. There is a multiple choice “solve” and a cypher “solve.” The multiple choice game is good for beginners. The cypher game is for advanced players. In the cypher game students have to spell the name of what they think they are seeing. In the puzzle game students are given the name of an object and then have to assemble the electron microscope picture. Mysteries of the Unseen WorldMysteries of the Unseen World has games and images arranged in four categories. The categories are science, human, nature, and modern.

23. Please visit iPadApps4School.com for more reviews of iPad apps for all grades.