Reading:
Kindle - The Kindle app is optimized for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, giving users the ability to read Kindle books, newspapers, magazines, textbooks and PDFs on a beautiful, easy-to-use interface. Amazon Whispersync automatically syncs yourlast page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights across devices (including Kindle), so you can pick up your book where you left off on another device. (Free)
Nook - Get the most incredible reading experience for your iPad, iPhone and iPod touch®. Access over 3 million books—including 1 million FREE titles—plus magazines, newspapers, comics, and more. (Free)
iBooks - iBooks is an amazing way to download and read books. iBooks includes the iBooks Store, where you can download the latest bestselling books or your favorite classics – day or night. Browse your library on a beautiful bookshelf, tap a book to open it, flip through pages with a swipe or a tap, and bookmark or add notes to your favorite passages. (Free)
Grammar:
Grammar Girl - Get Grammar Girl delivered right to your iPhone or iPad each week without any ads or announcements – just great tips to help you write more intelligently and effectively. ($1.99)
Grammar Up - Grammar Up is a multiple choice quiz system for English which provides over 1800 questions across 20 grammar categories. Grammar Up was designed to replicate questions with a business focus commonly found in the popular TOEIC (TM) English proficiency test. Grammar Up can help learners to improve their grammar, word selection and vocabulary. ($4.99)
Lit and Genres -
Poetry Creator - Verses is a new iPhone and iPad app that puts a fresh spin on a cherished classic: refrigerator magnet poetry. We built this app to set your creativity ablaze with Verses's limitless word mixing possibilities that allow you to become a kind of dictionary DJ. Arranging words into your own poetry is much easier and smoother (and thus more enjoyable) using Verses, as opposed to the original "real life" fridge magnets. But even more enjoyable is the pleasure of sharing your poetic creations with friends. (Free)
Shakespeare (by Readdle) - Shakespeare™ is a free app with the complete works of Shakespeare (41 plays, 154 sonnets and 6 poems, including doubtful works) and a searchable concordance to find the exact word or phrase you’re looking for (with “relaxed” searching to find words close to your search term). CUSTOMIZE YOUR READING EXPERIENCE by choosing from a variety of color combinations, change the font family and size, and jump around to different scenes. Detailed scene breakdowns give you an overview of the scenes within each play, their locations, and the characters present in each. (Free)
Literary Analysis Guide - Literary Analysis Guide is an essential tool for anyone studying literature or rhetoric in high school or college. Whether preparing for your Advanced Placement (AP) English Literature and Composition exam or writing a paper for a graduate-level literature course, Literary Analysis Guide will help you on your way. By arranging the elements of literature graphically around three wheels (poetry, prose, and rhetoric), teachers and students are better able to visualize how the elements of literature develop style and meaning. Click on any of the literary terms listed around the wheels, and a screen appears with a detailed definition of the term, several examples from literature, and additional questions to ask yourself about how that device is employed in the literature you are currently studying. Click on “Figures of Speech” from any of the three wheels, and the “Figures of Speech Wheel” appears, which functions in the same way as the three others.
Pocket Fiction - Stories have been around since the dawn of man. But it was never so easy to get FREE stories in your pocket as it is now. Pocket Fiction lets you save stories from online hosts to read at a later date, even when you're offline. Pocket Fiction can offer you multiple ways to search and sort stories from the hosts, helping you find the stories you are interested in. (Free)
Vocabulary, etc.
Exam Vocabulary Builder - This app is a great way to keep vocabulary skills fresh in the minds of your students. This is the free version of a full price app, but still has a hundred words that students can practice to improve vocabulary. Each word has synonyms and two example sentences that can be read aloud. Words are grouped as nouns, verbs and adjectives, and there is a quiz mode that has easy and challenging levels. You can search for words, or swipe through some flashcards. This app has some limitations due to the number
of tested words, but for a free app, it is still useful for the
classroom.
15,000 Useful Phrases - Enjoy another ebook in the "iRead Series". iRead gives you text zooming as well as landscape reading views. For those persons who Read, Write, and Speak English and want to improve their vocabulary, this is the definitive handbook of Pertinent Expressions, Striking Similes, Literary, Commercial, Conversational, and Oratorical Terms, for the Embellishment of Speech and Literature. ($.99)
Chicktionary - A popular app that is one of the best free apps for education users. It was a popular online word game that effortlessly made the leap to the Touch. Each chicken has a letter on it and you use these letters to make a combination of 3, 4, 5 or more letter words. The more words you can make the better your score. Don't like the order your letters are in? Shake the iPod Touch to shuffle the chickens/letters. The Lite version has 12 levels to try, so enough to keep the students happy for a good length of time.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary - America's most useful and respected dictionary. In addition to all the definitions from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, the app offers voice search – to let you look up a word without having to spell it – along with an integrated thesaurus, example sentences, Word of the Day, Favorites, and more. A great tool for reference, education, and vocabulary building. (free)
Miscellaneous:
iBrainstorm - Capturing and sharing your inner most creative genius has never been easier. Introducing the first multi-device collaboration tool from Universal Mind. From iPhone to iPad with just a flick of the finger, iBrainstorm has set the bar and has redefined the very nature of collaboration. (free)
Penultimate - The original and most popular handwriting app for iPad. Penultimate gives you the natural experience of writing on paper, with the added power and availability of Evernote. Take notes, keep sketches, or share your next idea. As part of the Evernote family of products, Penultimate will quickly become one of the core productivity apps on your iPad. Every Penultimate note is synced to your Evernote account automatically, and every detail of the user interface has been designed and refined to be simple and intuitive. (Free)
Essay Grader - Provide your students with exceptional feedback and reduce your grading time with Essay Grader. By moving back and forth between a series of tabs and clicking appropriate checkboxes, a feedback document is created for each essay you grade. The final assessment document(s) can then be emailed to the student, emailed to yourself, or exported to your computer for printing, editing, and archival. Essay Grader is not automatic grading software, but it helps you avoid writing the same comments over and over by hand and gives you the ability to provide more targeted and more comprehensive feedback than you can with a red pen. Essay Grader comes with six different banks of pre-written comments for a multitude of topics within the categories of praise, organization, content, mechanics, style, and documentation. The first and last paragraphs of the feedback document are optional free-write paragraphs where you have the ability to personalize each student’s feedback sheet. You can even write custom comments on the fly to be inserted into the student's feedback document. When you finish choosing the appropriate comments, simply assign a holistic grade on the “Grade” tab and that grade will appear at the bottom of the student’s feedback sheet. Everything is editable in this full version of Essay Grader iPad. You can customize all comment text, category labels, comment labels, and column labels to conform to any discipline, rubric, or grading style. Tabs can now be added and deleted as the program has become highly flexible concerning the format of your CSV database. ($9.99)
Useful Websites:
Teaching English with the iPad - A high school English teacher's blog in a school with a 1:1 iPad initiative. This teacher seems to have mostly freshmen classes and several neat ideas of how to implement the iPads with daily lessons and assessments. http://teachingenglishwiththeipad.blogspot.com/