Effective iPad Apps for the ESOL Classroom:

Socrative Teacher

An incredible free app that allows you to make, save edit and share quizzes. The most amazing part is that you can test students live in the classroom and get instant feedback on their results through bar graphs. You can also email the results to yourself, so you don’t have to grade anything.

Socrative Student

This is the student’s version (also free) which they download in order to join your room and take the quizzes. No account set up required.

iMovie

This app is a lot like Movie Maker. It allows you to use videos and pictures from the camera roll as well as music, sound recordings, and sound effects to make movies. There is also a trailer feature with awesome templates to make professional-looking trailers.

SoundNote

This is basically a recording device, but it’s really useful because you can also take notes while recording. When you want to share the notes, you have to option to email just the pdf of the notes, or both the pdf and the audio recording.

PuppetPals HD

PuppetPals is great for recording conversations, doing interviews, or role-playing for speaking practice. The app has a huge variety of characters and scenes to choose from. You can change the characters, move them, change the scenery, and record all the movements and sounds. It’s a creative way to practice speaking and save work for later review.

KeyNote, Numbers and Pages = Apple’s version of Microsoft’s Powerpoint, Excel and Word, which are essential to any classroom or office.

With this, you can create books with chapters,

Creative Book Builder

indexes, tables of contents and publish them on iBooks. Content can include text, videos, recordings, pictures, and audio. This is great for making vocabulary books, writing projects, and even new text books.

Educreations

Educreations acts like a whiteboard that records your voice and writing at the same time. You can access videos from other users from a large variety of subjects. You can add pictures from your camera roll as well and write on them. It can be used in many different subjects.