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I have researched and reviewed apps that I believe could be helpful in a high school math classroom.  Some of these apps I have had the opportunity to try out with my classes, and others I have not.  I would love to hear opinions from others in the education field on these apps or other apps that might be helpful.  Please feel free to leave your ideas/comments here or anywhere else on this blog.  Thanks!

myHomework

Price:  Free ($1.99 for the ad-free version)

Purpose/Capabilities: 

The myHomework app is a student planner that allows students to make a list of their classes and record their daily homework assignments.  The homework section has three categories: complete, late, and upcoming.  The user can check off the assignment (an upcoming or late assignment) when he or she completes it.  It will then move to the completed section.  There is a calendar feature that will show the user the assignments marked on the day it is due.  The user can change the priority or type of assignment, perhaps listing a test as a high priority. 

Recently added is the teacher feature.  Teachers can create accounts through Teacher.io (https://teachers.io) that students can link their myHomework accounts to.  The teacher and student both must create accounts in order to do this.  Teachers can post their syllabus, any assignments, and notifications of any upcoming tests with corresponding descriptions.  The teacher an also upload attachments for the students to download.

Positive Aspects: 

This app has 469 reviews through the iPad App Store with 4 ½ out of 5 stars and almost all good reviews.  The myHomework app seems extremely easy to use.  It is a great way for students to keep track of their assignments and upcoming assessments.  The teacher component of this app is very new but seems like a great added bonus.  A student can simply search for their teacher by finding their school and going through the teachers who have accounts through Teacher.io.  The student can then select to join their class.  The assignments and announcements the teacher posts will automatically be added to the student’s agenda.  The student can then check the assignments off as he or she completes them.

Negative Aspects: 

The app does have ads at the bottom of the screen that can be an annoyance.  It costs $1.99 to remove them.  The teacher component of the app is very new, and therefore there is not much information available on it.  I did create an account for myself and linked it to my myHomework account.  It seems to work well.

Quizlet

Price:  Free

Purpose/Capabilities: 

Quizlet is a website and an app that aids students in studying.  The app has three modes – flash cards, learn, and scatter.  The flash card mode shows one side of the flashcard and allows you to swipe to see the answer side of the card.  You can also play it like a slideshow and go through the different cards automatically.  The learn mode allows you to key in your response and mark whether you got it correct or not.  Once you got it correct twice, it says you mastered that card.  It tracks your progress and saves it for you to view at a later point.  Finally, the scatter mode is more like a game.  It times the user in matching up the expressions/terms that go together.        

Positive Aspects: 

One of the great features of Quizlet is that you can share flashcards and use another person’s   Quizlet has over 21 million flash card sets already created to choose from.  The site also allows users to create new sets and choose whether they want to make it private, share it with their “class” (group they are in with others, which might be great for teachers to share with their students), share using a password, or make it public for everyone to view.

already made flashcards.

Another great feature of the app is that it works offline.  Once the user has the flashcard set, he/she can use it without connecting to the internet.  This is great if a student does not have internet access at home or if students are using it in school and the network is slow or busy.

Negative Aspects: 

The Quizlet app does not yet allow you to create your own flashcard set through the app.  You can, however, create it using the Quizlet website (http://quizlet.com) and then it will automatically appear on the app so long as it is linked to the same Quizlet account.  The app does claim this feature is coming soon, which would be a helpful addition.

Obviously, since anyone can create or share a flashcard set, it is possible to have incorrect information on the cards.  Students should be careful when selecting a premade set.

Math Ref

Price:  Free/$1.99

Purpose/Capabilities: 

Math Ref Free is the free version of Math Ref.  Both apps, as the names suggest, are reference tools for middle and high school level math courses (and physics).  The topics include algebra, geometry, trigonometry, series and sequences, differentiation, integration, probability and statistics, physics, algorithms, financial, Greek alphabet, and prime numbers.  Within each of these topics, there are subtopics to get more information about.  It gives the definition or equation for the given subtopic and provides helpful explanations and examples for these topics where applicable.  Also included is a section for you to write your own notes about the topic.  You can print or e-mail the information to yourself.

Positive Aspects: 

The free version of the app has over 700 formulas, figures, tips, and examples, and the full version has over 1,400.  It is a great, quick way for students to reference information on different mathematical concepts that is all in one place.  When going through the material, students have the opportunity to add their own thoughts in the notes section for when they refer back to the reference tool.

In addition to all the reference material the app has, it also contains “tools” which include a quadratic solver, a remainder finder, triangle solver, angle converter, and more.

Negative Aspects: 

The information for each of the topics is limited, but it is a great starting point for students to turn to in which they can add their own notes in order to make it more complete.  The other issue that may occur is the definitions or formulas may be slightly different than the ones given in class or in the course book.   Students should be made aware of this.

Sketchpad Explorer

Price:  Free

Purpose/Capabilities: 

Based on The Geometer’s Sketchpad software, the Sketchpad Explorer app allows you to interact with and investigate any document created in Sketchpad, allowing students to have hands-on experiences for investigating a variety of different concepts.  The teacher can create their own document using Geometer’s Sketchpad on their computer, or there is a large variety of pre-made materials available to use.  The students can then drag, manipulate, and animate the document to develop generalizations of the different mathematical concepts they are studying.

Geometer’s Sketchpad and Sketchpad Explorer are not only for Geometry related topics.  It is great for investigating elementary mathematics, algebraic concepts (such as slope, functions, understanding variables), trigonometry (unit circle, sine and cosine values and graphs, polar graphs and complex numbers), and calculus (limits, derivatives, and integrals). 

Positive Aspects: 

Sketchpad Explorer is a great, free way for students to visually see mathematical concepts in action by generalizing what happens when the visual is manipulated in different ways.  The app has a getting started tutorial that is helpful in learning the ins and outs of what the app is capable of.  It has several networked documents that can easily be accessed through the app.  This includes elementary mathematics, geometry constructions, ellipse constructions, dynagraphs, and slope.  It also has a link to the website for the app, which has many more already made activities to use in your classes that can easily be downloaded.  If you want to use this in your classes, you can save the document and upload it to your website/wiki.  Once the document is saved, students can access it at any time and refer back to what they learned.   Most of the documents take only seconds/minutes for the students to manipulate in order to make these generalizations.

Negative Aspects: 

Sketchpad Explorer was, for me, one of the more difficult apps to intuitively figure out how to use, at least initially.  However, once you have the documents already there, it is very easy to manipulate them to show the different concept.  It takes a decent amount of time creating different documents from scratch, but there are so many already made ones that this may not be necessary.

GoodReader

Price:  $4.99

Purpose/Capabilities:  

GoodReader is an app that allows its users to annotate PDFs.  Users can add typewriter text boxes, sticky notes, lines, arrows, freehand drawings, highlight important text, and more to their document.  There are a large variety of colors to use for all of these mark-ups, and they can each be deleted or edited if you make a mistake or want to change something.

GoodReader also makes it possible for its users to manage their files.  All annotated (or not annotated) text files can be saved in GoodReader.  The user can then create folders and subfolders to organize their work. 

In addition, GoodReader allows users to transfer files by syncing with different remote servers such as Dropbox, SkyDrive, SugarSync, and any WebDAV, AFP, SMB, FTP, or SFTP server.

GoodReader is primarily known for annotating PDF and text files, but it can also be used with MS Office, iWork (’08, ’09), HTML and Safari web archives, high-resolution images, and audio and video files.

Positive Aspects: 

GoodReader is a great app to assist in the workflow from teacher to student and back to the teacher in a paperless (or less paper) classroom.  Teachers can post assignments as PDF files on their wiki.  Students can go to the wiki, get the file, save it in GoodReader, complete their assignment directly on the document, and send it back to the teacher. 

GoodReader has so many options to mark-up text and is very easy to use!  After reading many reviews about GoodReader, I have found that many people refer to it as the “Swiss army knife” of apps.

Negative Aspects: 

GoodReader is $4.99, one of the more expensive apps that I am reviewing.  From what I can see, however, there is no comparable app that does everything that GoodReader does for less money.  IAnnotate and GoodNotes, are comparable apps that have free versions but with limited capabilities.  If you/your school can not afford $4.99/iPad, these free versions might be worth checking out.

Socrative (Teacher & Student)

Price:  Free

Purpose/Capabilities: 

The Socrative app has the same capabilities as the website.  There is a teacher version of this app and a student version of this app.  The teacher can create quizzes, exit tickets, or space race games for students to complete on the learning goals for the lesson.  It allows teachers to create both multiple choice and short answer questions.  It can be anonymous, or the students can be asked to fill in their name.  It can be used to quickly and easily assess students for content knowledge of any topic.  The teacher can run a “teacher-paced quiz” where student have a limited time to answer a question, then everyone goes to the next question, or a “student-paced quiz,” where students can have as much time as they need to complete each question.  

Positive Aspects: 

 Socrative is a quick and easy way for teachers to get real feedback on how well their students understand a particular topic.  The students generally like using this app because they can complete the questions without feeling insecure, since the other students in the class will not know their responses.  I use the quiz feature most often because it will create an Excel spreadsheet of the data from the class’s responses.  I mix up both multiple choice questions and short answer questions.   The teacher can program correct responses for multiple choice questions which will appear in green on the spreadsheet and wrong answers in red to make it easy to assess.  These assessments can be made ahead of time and can be as long or short and as general or specific as the teacher wants.

Negative Aspects: 

 There is no math type in Socrative, so it is hard to type in some equations.  In addition, I have had one or two instances where the student version of the app did not work for all my students during class.  In this case, I had them go to the website; it just took longer for them to get there.  There have been updates as recently as three days ago, so hopefully this has been fixed.

Overall, I love this app and website for the classroom.  It is an excellent way to informally (or formally) assess student understanding quickly and efficiently.  You have immediate feedback on how your students are doing before you move on to a new topic.

Geoboard

Price:  Free

Purpose/Capabilities: 

Geoboards are manipulatives that can be used by elementary, middle, and high school students to explore a variety of mathematical topics from shapes, perimeter, area, and congruence for geometry related topics to fractions, linear equations, and linear systems for algebra and pre-algebra related topics.  This app is the virtual version of the Geoboard with the same capabilities and more.  The app has what seems like an unlimited supply of eight different colored rubber bands and two different size boards, a 25-peg board and a 150-peg board.

Positive Aspects: 

The benefit of using Geoboards in class is to allow students the hands on experience of exploring a concept on their own and being able to make and see a visual representation.  The benefits of using the app over the Geoboards themselves are the convenience, having an unlimited supply of all the different color rubber bands, being able to switch between a 25-peg board and the expanded 150-peg board with just a swipe of the finger, and having the quick clean up without having to pick rubber bands off the floor or worry about them being flung across the room.  In addition, students have the ability to take a screenshot of their work so they can look back on what they previously did.

Different ways to use this app.

Negative Aspects: 

Some may feel that the iPad version of the app does not feel as hands-on, but in my opinion, the positives far out way the negatives with this app.  There are only a limited number of concepts that can be thoroughly explored using the Georboard, but for those concepts, I think this app is a great resource.

**These pictures were taken from iTunes Preview.  For more ideas see: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/geoboard-by-math-learning/id519896952?mt=8.

Sample Activity: 

I worked with one of my colleagues in the math department to develop a sample activity for the Geoboard app.  The colleague of mine often uses Geoboards in his Geometry classes to have students discover concepts or formulas on their own.  He showed me one of his activities for investigating the formula for area of a parallelogram which I revised to fit the Geoboard app.  See the link below for a copy of this activity.

Geoboard Activity

Free Graphing Calculator

Price:  Free ($0.99 to remove ads)

Purpose/Capabilities: 

This free graphing calculator app has a scientific calculator which can take nth roots, find logarithms of any base, compute absolute value, factorials, permutations, combinations, select a random integer, and switch between fractions and decimals. 

The graphing calculator can graph up to four equations at one time (each graph is labeled for distinguishing purposes).  It can find the roots and points of intersection by simplify tapping on the point.  You can also hit the “table” tab on the bottom of the app to see a full table of values for the graph that you can determine the x-value in which the table starts as well as the increments it increases by.  The new update also allows the user to graph in polar coordinates and graph parametric equations.

There is a reference section that contains different formulas and information organized by subject content.  For example, the trigonometry section contains definitions of the different trig functions, a detailed unit circle, identities, laws of sine and cosine, angle addition/subtraction formulas, half angle and double angle formulas, and more.

This app also contains a unit converter and important constants such as the speed of light, gravity, etc..  The polynomial solver allows the user to put in a linear, quadratic, or cubic equation in standard form and it will find the real solutions.

Positive Aspects: 

The free graphing calculator app is one of my favorites to use with my students.  It is very easy to use and even easier than a hand held graphing calculator to adjust the graph and zoom in and out, done simply by dragging and pinching the graph (you can also do this by changing the settings).  Until I researched the app to write this review, I had no idea of how much this app was really capable of doing.  I downloaded the new version of this app to test out the polar graphing capabilities, something that you previously had to pay to use. 

This app is great for discovery activities where students can adjust an equation to determine how to transform a graph, checking answers, and referencing formula.  I always have my students use this to check their homework answers (when applicable) so they can try to fix their mistakes before coming into class.

Negative Aspects: 

In order to enter a function in the graphing calculator (or polynomial solver) it must be in standard form, similar to a hand held graphing calculator.  The polynomial solver only gives real solutions.  One ad usually appears on the top or bottom of the screen in the free version.  It costs $0.99 to upgrade to the ad free version. 

This is a great app.  One that should be on every math teacher or student’s iPad!

Sample Activity: 

The Free Graphing Calculator app is great for investigating how the graphs of different functions are affected by their equation.  Below you will find a graphing calculator investigation for absolute value functions that I have adapted for this app, including directions on how to use it.  Similar investigations can be made for any family of functions.

Absolute Value Function Investigation

WolframAlpha

Price:  $2.99

Purpose/Capabilities: 

WolframAlpha is a reference app that allows its users to look up different concepts in mathematics, statistics and data analysis, physics, chemistry, materials, engineering, astronomy, earth science, life science, computational science, units and measures, dates and times, weather, places and geography, people and history, culture and media, music, words and linguistics, sports and games, colors, money and finance, socioeconomic data, health and medicine, food and nutrition, education, organizations, transportation, technological world, and web and computer systems (so basically everything!).  It is based off the free website with the same name. 

Not only can you get information about all these different concepts, but Wolfram can also perform complicated computations (including finding derivatives and integrals for a Calculus class) with the steps to go along with it.  It can graph different functions in 2D as well as three dimensional graphs and inequalities, which most graphing calculator apps cannot do.

Results from searching "exponential functions".

Positive Aspects: 

Unlike the free website and many other search engine sites, the WolframAlpha app does not have ads.  It is very user friendly; you simply type in a term or question you want to look up or type in a function to graph or equation to solve.  Wolfram Alpha is a great, reliable source for students to look up information, check their answers, or get help when they are stuck on a homework problem.  It has specialized keyboards to type in math functions. 

Negative Aspects: 

The WolframAlpha app does require the internet in order to use, so if an entire class is using it at once, it can become slow.  As previously stated, the app costs $2.99, whereas the website is free.  The app is considered to be quicker and easier to use than the site.

Educreations

Price:  Free 

Purpose/Capabilities: 

Educreations is an interactive whiteboard with voice recording, the ability to import images, write on the screen with four different colored inks, add text, and share the video through e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, or upload it to a website.

Educreations can be used in the classroom by the teacher or the students.  It is a great way for teachers to preview material and have students watch it before coming into class, work through a homework problem that students had trouble with without spending class time on it, add commentary to an image, and provide extra help tutorials for difficult concepts.  Students can also use Educreations themselves to showcase and explain a problem they solved.

 Positive Aspects: 

This is what the blank screen looks like.

Educreations is very intuitive and easy to use.  It has great potential for both teachers and students.  Educreations does allow you to create multiple screens for one project and go back and forth between them.  You can record and write at the same time, or if you prefer, you can have it all written or drawn out and then record the explanation to go along with the different screens.  You can pause the audio and continue recording as well.

Negative Aspects: 

Educreations does not have an eraser feature, only an undo button that will delete the last move (you can use it multiple times in a row).  In addition, with this app, you cannot save your work unless it is recorded.  Once you record, you cannot go back and edit your recording.  If you make a mistake, you are forced to start again from the beginning.  Despite these negatives, Educreations is definitely a must try, especially since it is free!

Sample Activity:
In each of my Honors Algebra II classes, I had my students use Educreations to create a video explaining an application of exponential functions.  There were seven application problems and each group was selected to be the experts of a particular problem.  They were to solve that problem first and create a video explaining the problem and how to solve it.  After previewing the videos myself, I posted them on the class wiki and the rest of the class was able to check their work using the videos.  They were asked to comment on at least one other group's video.  Below you will find the link to the directions and rubric I used in my class, which can definitely be adapted for other activities.

Educreations Video Assignment