Here are some FREE educational and creative apps to start the New Year off right!

If you are looking for apps to use with a classroom with limited iPad access, Venn Diagram is the app for you! This app can allow your classroom to create Venn Diagrams with ease and make them look good too! Imagine you have a room full of students and one iPad hooked up via a Apple TV. You could pass the iPad around and have students add their thoughts while everyone can see the changes made via the projector.

This app can also be used by individual students to create diagrams and then share them via email or as a jpg.

When I was a young lad, I remember rushing through my vocab test in Mrs. Slade's English class so that I could have the chance to fill out one of the Mad Lib's she would have available. This habit eventually lead to some not so great vocab test scores, but boy, could I rock out some pretty sweet adjectives on the spot!

Well, now you can introduce your classroom and students to a new version of Mad Libs via the free app, SparkleFish. SparkleFish offers five different themed Mad Libs that ask the student for a word type, which the student then records. Once they have completed all the words, it reads the story to them while adding their own recorded words. Students are psyched when they hear their own voice and are actually excited to learn about nouns and verbs!

A bonus part of this app is that it has a huge list of suggestions for all the nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. Even struggling students can succeed at this app and create imaginative stories with ease!

Remember the fun of rearranging those magnetic word poems on a friends fridge to make humorous sayings? Well the fun can continue with Word Mover for the iPad! Students can create separate accounts on one iPad to make poems using random words or input words you have instructed them too. Students can then save them as a photo, email them, or print them. 

This app could be used to help students form sentences, phrases, show understanding, or for the creative math teacher, word problems! 

Word Mover is from the National Council of Teachers of English, who are the same people who bring you the awesome website www.readwritethink.org. The app is also free!