A Must Have Guide on How to Evaluate Apps for The Classroom

September 4, 2015
Evaluating Apps for the Classroom is an excellent free short interactive eBook (15 pages) created by Apple Education to be read on iBooks. As its title indicate, this guide is meant to help teachers make informed decisions about educational apps to integrate in their classroom instruction. Sifting through tons of educational apps in the App Store can be a daunting task especially for teachers whose schedules are already full enough to allow for such an endeavour. This is where the utility of such a guide comes in handy. It provides you with a set of tips and ideas to help you better evaluate educational apps and  tap into the learning potential of iPad.

Evaluating Apps for the Classroom provides an evaluative framework comprised of five main criteria for how to evaluate educational apps. These criteria include: developmental appropriateness, instructional design, engagement and motivation, balance of interactive features, and accessibility. Each of these five criteria is further explained with a set of guiding factors and illustrated with few examples of apps that best demonstrate it.

Planning to integrate iPad in your instruction, Evaluating Apps for the Classroom is definitely a must have guide.

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Two Handy Google Docs Rubrics for Evaluating Educational Apps

July 5, 2015
Here are two  interestingly simple app evaluation rubric you can use with your students to assess the educational apps you want to use in your class.  The first one is a rubric we learned through Kathy Schlock’s iPad4teaching page. This is basically a Google sheets template available for free in Drive Template Gallery. The second one is a template we discovered through running a search query with the key phrase 'app evaluation' in Template Gallery. These are probably the only two app evaluation templates available in the Gallery so far.

1-App Evaluation

The rubric features several criteria for assessing apps. These include: the intuitivity of the app’s interface, content sharing options within the app, privacy related issues with the app’s settings, quality of multimedia, accessibility/inaccessibility of inappropriate content through the app, flexibility in use within the app and many more.

2- iPad App Evaluation

This is another handy and down-to-earth simple document to help you assess educational apps. It is particularly useful for ‘groups to try, report, recommend individual apps for student/teacher use’.

For a list of some excellent app evaluation rubrics and resources, Kathy Schrock has this wonderful page packed full of everything you need. Enjoy

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