iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

At last count, there were over 80,000 educational apps available to teachers. There are apps for everything: literacy, STEM, productivity, audiovisual, etc. There are apps which improve accessibility for students with different learning challenges, i.e. text to voice, voice to text, etc.

While many of these may be a dream come true for educators, the dizzying array of choices is also a nightmare. Teachers just don’t have time to filter through thousands of apps to find the one that works best for the needs of their students. To help, we started to create curated lists of the best apps in a variety of education related categories. In this installment, we will present the best grammar and writing apps for middle school students.

The best writing apps for iPad, like any concept of ‘best,’ is subjective and further based on need and circumstance.

Are you a poet drafting when inspiration strikes? A student taking notes and writing essays? A novelist that usually uses a desktop, but needs their new iPad Pro to do work on the go?

While the idea of writing more than a few hundred words on an iPad may seem crazy, using the iPad as a powerful portable writing tool allows you to take advantage of inspiration whenever and wherever it strikes. And with iPad screens now approaching 13″ and capable of supporting USB connections to enable standalone keyboards, it’s easier and more comfortable than ever to draft a masterpiece while away from your desk with the help of an app, an iPad, and a good idea.

The best writing apps for iPad, like any concept of ‘best,’ is subjective and further based on need and circumstance.

Are you a poet drafting when inspiration strikes? A student taking notes and writing essays? A novelist that usually uses a desktop, but needs their new iPad Pro to do work on the go?

While the idea of writing more than a few hundred words on an iPad may seem crazy, using the iPad as a powerful portable writing tool allows you to take advantage of inspiration whenever and wherever it strikes. And with iPad screens now approaching 13″ and capable of supporting USB connections to enable standalone keyboards, it’s easier and more comfortable than ever to draft a masterpiece while away from your desk with the help of an app, an iPad, and a good idea.

Over the last few days, I’ve tried out dozens of writing platforms, cloud-based and locally installed. I’ve downloaded apps to my devices, played with features, wondered at how each tool might change the how of my work and also the shape of the work itself.
I found a handful of tools I’m going to recommend here. Most work well for collaboration. Not all of them allow for the kind of dynamic synchronous writing sessions that Google Docs enables. What I found is that testing tools and thinking through their features forced me to ask questions about how I do the work of writing and how (and where) I want to do that work going forward. These are in no particular order. (Except you can skip to the end if you want to see the tool I’m using to write this post.)