Educational Apps Mentioned on Twitter #edapp
Friday, March 12, 2010 at 11:22PM 
There are over 600 apps added to the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad App Store each day. Only a small fraction of those apps are useful for education. Luckily, a small fraction of 160,000 total apps is still a large number! It can be a challenge to stay tuned into the latest and greatest teaching and learning apps.
Fortunately, some helpful educators have put together various lists of recommended apps:
- Learning Continuity Sortable App List by Discipline
- iNtouch School Top 50 Elementary and Secondary Apps
- Leaders Technology Apps for Possible Educational Uses
- Planeten Paultje's Lists of iPhone Applications for Education
- TCEA 2010 iPod touch Apps Member Suggestions
- iSchool Initiative Educational Applications
- Educational App Reviews at iear.org
- Educators share and vote on their favorite apps at Google Moderator
Another place where educators are sharing great apps for teaching and learning is Twitter. Here are some of the apps I have tweeted about:
The free Dragon Dictation speech-to-text app has been updated to work on iPod touch (you will need a mic): http://tonyv.me/dragon
IWantItBack is now a feee app. Track what you lend friends, family, colleagues, and students. http://tonyv.me/wantback
PhotoMV is free today. Use it to combine photos, music, and text into slideshows: http://tonyv.me/photomv
Touch Mouse turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a wireless keyboard and mouse for your computer. It's free:http://tonyv.me/tmouse
Kinematix app is free for a limited time:http://tonyv.me/kinematix "Unleash your inner engineer."
Avatar Creator 2 is free this weekend in the App Store.http://tonyv.me/ac2
Finger Physics game is free today in the App Store:http://tonyv.me/ff
Lola's Flag Adventure app is free this weekend. It has games to learn world flags: http://tonyv.me/lola
Flashcard Touch app is free this month. Access pre-made flashcards or make your own: http://tonyv.me/flashcard.
You can't edit Google Docs in the browser. But you can in some apps like Docs To Go: http://tonyv.me/gtgp
NASA app has mission info, countdown clocks, orbit trackers, images, and videos. http://tonyv.me/nasa #edapp
Notice in the final tweet I included #edapp. This is called a hashtag. The hashtag begins with the number sign and then contains a keyword. Hashtags make it easier to search and archive tweets. I plan to tag each of my future tweets with #edapp when I mention an educational application and I hope you will too.
You can search for recent tweets tagged #edapp at search.twitter.com. Archives of all tweets tagged #edapp can be found at Twapper Keeper and Twubs. In the future these archives should be full of great app suggestions.
You can see that my tweets above contain web links. Clicking one of those links launches iTunes and opens the details page for the mentioned app. If you want to create a link to an app you find in iTunes to include in a tweet, click the arrow next to the Free/Buy button and choose Copy Link.
The copied link will be similar to this one: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nasa-app/id334325516?mt=8. The 56 characters in that URL will take up too much of the 140 character limit of a tweet. Twitter will shorten long links automatically for you using bit.ly, though you are free to shorten them yourself with services like is.gd, moourl, j.mp, and tinyyurl. My links all begin with tonyv.me because that's my URL shortener.
Including links in tweets tagged #edapp will make them even more helpful. See recent #edapp tweets below:
If you're not familiar with Twitter learn the basics by reading 10 Things Teachers Should Know to Get Started with Twitter. If you are familiar with Twitter, please spread the word about the #edapp hashtag.
Reader Comments (2)
You might notice that some of the apps I tweeted about above have changed in price. That because app developers often put their apps on sale or offer them for free for a limited time, so can prices change. I like to tweet about educational apps that go on sale. Check the tweets often so you can grab the deals while they last. :-)
great idea- working together to help find great apps that will work in education!!
:)