Reading stories, watching videos, and listening to podcasts is one way to learn with an iPad. But a more fun way to learn with an iPad is to create things. Here are five iPad apps that elementary school students can use to create stories.

Doodlecast for Kids is an iPad app that allows students to create short whiteboard videos. Students can create short videos by drawing on a blank whiteboard. Students can record their voices as they draw on the whiteboard. Students who are struggling to start their stories can use one of the twenty-three story prompts offered by Doodlecast for Kids. A student’s video can be up to three minutes long. Videos can be saved to a student’s iPad’s camera roll and or uploaded to YouTube.

The Collins Big Cat iPad apps are part short story and part story creation tool. Each of these free apps, produced by Harper Collins, contains a short story that students can read to themselves or have narrated to them. The stories contain interactive elements that students can move around on each page of the stories. After reading and or listening to the story in the app students can create their own stories using settings and characters that match the theme of the story they just read. On each page students can select a background, drag design features into the background, drag characters into the story, add text, and record their own narrations for their stories.

Story Wheel is an app for the iPad and iPhone that is designed to promote audio storytelling. Spin the Story Wheel on your device and when it lands on an image, dictate a short story based on that image. When you are finished recording, you can play your story back with animations generated by Story Wheel. You can try the basic Story Wheel app for free. To get the most out of the app you will probably want to get the full version of the app for $2.99.

Little Story Maker is a great little app that adults and children can use to create their own custom books on their iPads. The app provides book templates that you complete with your own images, text, and voice narration. All of the books that you create are stored in your Little Story Maker bookshelf. To create a book in Little Story Maker start by adding a title, add a cover image by selecting from your iPad’s camera roll, then choose a template for your book. On each page you can add an image from your camera roll and type the text for your page. If you want to add narration to your book simply click the “record audio” button after typing your text. Then you can add narration that will play on the page.

Book Creator ($4.99) allows anyone to create their own books using images, text, videos, and audio recordings. You can arrange your book in three different formats; portrait, square, or landscape. Each page in your book can include pictures and videos from your iPad’s camera roll and or from your iTunes library. In addition to the pictures and videos you can include as much as text as you can fit on each page. In fact, if you just want to have text on a page you can do that. If you would like to narrate your book you can tap the record button to add your voice to each page of your book. Every page in your book can have a custom color scheme.

Frog Dissection for iPad is an app that is popular with biology teachers. The latest version of the app includes more labels, quizzes, and videos. Of course, the main purpose of the app still remains. That purpose is to provide a virtual environment in which students can dissect a frog just as they would if they had a frog and a scalpel in your classroom. The app provides step-by-step directions for students to follow as they virtually dissect their frogs.

At $3.99 Frog Dissection for iPad is kind of pricey yet still cheaper than a lot of the frog dissection kits on the market. And your students can use the app until they get the dissection right. There’s no do-over with a real frog.

Last week I spent a day working with teachers at Bridgton Academy in Bridgton, Maine. Bridgton Academy is a private boarding school serving male students who have completed high school, but are spending a year gaining more skills and knowledge before going to college. I was invited to spend the day consulting with teachers to develop ideas and strategies for using iPads with their students. There was a healthy mix teachers’ needs and desires for the day. In no particular order, the list below contains the apps that we ended up spending the most time exploring.

Easy Portfolio is a nice iPad app for creating portfolios of your work and or your students’ work. In Easy Portfolio you can create multiple portfolios containing pictures, videos, links, notes, documents, and audio recordings. You can import files from your iPad to any of your portfolios. You can also create new media from scratch within each of your portfolios. You can share individual portfolio elements or entire portfolios via email or Dropbox.

GoClass is a free iPad application for creating short lessons and delivering them to your students. The lessons can include annotated images, free hand sketches, text, and video. GoClass gives teachers tools for creating class rosters that they can use to keep track of which students are using the lessons when. Teachers also have the option to ask questions and poll their students. After the students’ response have been gathered teachers can project those responses without showing individual student’s names.

Coach My Video is an iPad app that allows coaches to video their players in action to provide feedback on their movements and techniques. With Coach My Video installed you can record a video of your player(s) in action then as you play the video back you can pause it to annotate the the video frame-by-frame. You can draw on the video to illustrate a movement or to point out something that needs correction. In other words, you’re kind of like John Madden with his telestrator. When you have finished marking up your video you can email to your players for them to view on their iPads or laptops.

Ask3 is a free iPad app from TechSmith. TechSmith is probably best known as being the company that produces Jing and Camtasia screen capture software. Ask3 is a tool that teachers can use to create short instructional videos that are shared directly to their students’ iPads. Students can use Ask3 to ask questions about the video, mark the video with drawing tools, and create their own audio comments about the video.

inClass is a fantastic free iPad app that students can use to take and keep track of the notes they record in all of their courses. inClass allows students to organize notebooks for each of their courses. Within each notebook students can include typed notes, audio notes, video notes, and pictures. The ability to store those four types of notes makes inClass a great app for students to use in a science lab where they might want to have a little video clip of an experiment along with their own typed notes about the lab experiment.

Penultimate provides a place for you to hand-write notes on your iPad. The app allows you to create multiple notebooks with multiple pages in each. You can change the color and size of the pen strokes that are created when you write in your notebooks. Each page in your notebook can include pictures that you have stored on your iPad or pictures that you take through the Penultimate app. The app provides the option to change the look of the virtual paper on which you write. You can copy and paste content from one page to another and from one notebook to another.

Gooru Collections is designed for students in grades five through twelve. Through the app students can find collections of resources for studying and learning about mathematics and science. To find some resources select science or math then choose a subject within either of those categories. Before you open a collection of resources you can preview the material to see if it contains videos, text, or links to websites.

Animation Desk is an iPad app (free and premium versions available) for creating short, animated videos. The app allows you to create drawings using just your finger on your iPad’s screen. In the free version of the app you can create up to 50 scenes in each of your projects. In each scene you can include as little or as much as you want to draw on the canvas. There are a few different brush and pencil effects that you can use in your drawings. The opacity of the colors you choose can be altered too. When you have completed drawing all of your scenes hit the play button to watch your animation unfold. If you’re happy with your animation you can export it to YouTube.

Haiku Deck is an iPad app that all students and teachers should have installed on their iPads. Haiku Deck enables anyone to create beautiful slide presentations. There are two features of Haiku Deck that stand out. First, Haiku Deck intentionally limits how much text that you can put on each of your slides. Second, Haiku Deck helps you find Creative Commons licensed images for your presentations. When you type a word or words on your slides you can have Haiku Deck search for images for you. The images that Haiku Deck serves up are large enough to completely fill your slide. You can also upload your own images from your iPad or import images from Instagram and Facebook.

123D Catch is a free iPad app from Autodesk. The app makes it possible to turn your pictures into a 3D model that you can manipulate on your iPad. To create a model with the app select a physical object that you can photograph with your iPad. Then take a series of pictures of that object as you either walk around it or rotate it slowly as you take pictures of it. Then select the best images from those that you took (20+ images works best) to let Autodesk process and turn into a 3D model for you. Completed 3D models can be shared to the Autodesk community where others can view and use them.

Book Creator allows anyone to create their own books using images, text, videos, and audio recordings. You can arrange your book in three different formats; portrait, square, or landscape. Each page in your book can include pictures and videos from your iPad’s camera roll and or from your iTunes library. In addition to the pictures and videos you can include as much as text as you can fit on each page. In fact, if you just want to have text on a page you can do that. If you would like to narrate your book you can tap the record button to add your voice to each page of your book. Every page in your book can have a custom color scheme.

OSnap is an iPad app (available in a free version and in a paid version) that you can use to create stop motion and time lapse videos. The app is quite easy to use. To create a video with the OSnap app you simply need to start a project and take a series of still pictures using your iPad’s camera. Then adjust the number of frame per second to edit your video. If you want to, you can add a sound track to your video by selecting audio files that are stored on your iPad. You can go back and edit your videos by removing images and from the project at any time. Completed projects can be stored on your iPad, uploaded to YouTube, or shared via email.

Subtext is a great free iPad app that provides a place for teachers and students to have digital book discussions. These are some of the many things that you can do with Subtext: using Subtext you can read ebooks, annotate ebooks, create quizzes about ebooks, and write blog posts about the ebooks you read. You can create private and public book discussion groups and build bookshelves for your groups.

Blogger for iPad and iPhone makes it easy to post to a Blogger blog. Through the app you can post to any Blogger blog that you are a member of. The app allows you to quickly take a picture and add it to a post. At Bridgton Academy we talked about using the Blogger app to have students contribute to a blog on which they post reflections on learning.

Wolfram Alpha’s iPad app puts Wolfram’s computational search engine on your iPad. It’s an indispensable app that offers more than just help with mathematics. The app is excellent for finding and comparing data and information about a diverse array of topics.

Aurasma is a free app for iPads, iPhones, and  Android devices. Using Aurasma you can create augmented reality layers, Aurasma calls them “auras,” that pop-up when you scan objects with your phone or tablet.

Apps Gone Free is a great app on which you can find apps that would normally require a purchase. The Apps Gone Free app lists new apps every day. Some of the apps are only free to download that day while others may remain free for a week or longer. I check it every morning.

Project Noah is a globally collaborative project to which anyone can contribute. On Project Noah you can share pictures and stories of the plants and the animals that you observe in your neighborhood. Project Noah has a section titled Missions in which you can find projects that you can contribute to. The Missions ask people to make contributions of images and observations about a specific animal, plant, or region. Check out the squirrel mission to get started. Project Noah offers iOS and Android apps that you can use to record and share your observations on the go.

Project Noah has an Education section in which teachers can register their classrooms. Once registered teachers can assign Missions to their students and track their students’ observations.

Pixlr is a company that offers a great collection of image editing tools for iOS, Android, and Chrome. I’ve been using Pixlr on my Android phone for the last 18 months. Recently, I installed Pixlr Express Plus on my iPad.

Pixlr Express Plus for iPad is a free app that provides intuitive tools for cropping your pictures, fixing the light balance, removing red eyes, and changing the contrast of your pictures. Pixlr Express Plus also provides some Instagram-like filters that you can apply to your images.

I recommend Pixlr’s tools because they don’t require you to create an account. And if your school uses a mix of iPads, laptops, and Android devices Pixlr has something for everyone.

Ocean Science is a free iPad app that at least six people have recommended to me over the last few weeks. The app is essentially a seven chapter, multimedia ebook about the basics of ocean science. Each chapter includes animations, pictures, video, and text. You can toggle back and forth between the multimedia elements and the text in a document. A useful aspect of the app for students is that you can take notes within the margins of the text.

The chapters of Ocean Science cover aspects of biology, ocean currents, conservation, and exploration. Ocean Science could be a good app to use as part of an introductory marine biology lesson.

Kindoma Storytime is a free iPad app that I can definitely see myself using with my nieces who live 1,000 miles away from me. Kindoma Storytime allows me to read stories my nieces through our iPads. Here’s how it works; after I create a free account I can invite my family members to connect with me through the app (they will have to have it on their iPads too). Once we’re connected the app is a bit Skype-like as we can video call each other. When we’re connected we can pick a book from the library of free books. As I read my nieces will see the same page that I’m on and will see the pages turn when I turn them. Of course, when my nieces get older they can use the app to read to me too.

A demonstration of the Kindoma Storytime app is embedded below.

VerbBusters is a straight-forward iPad app for learning and practicing recognizing English irregular verbs. VerbBusters supports learners whose native languages are French, Spanish, German, Portugese, and Italian. The app can also be used by native English speakers to practice recognizing past and present tenses of verbs.

VerbBusters has two modes; a practice mode and a quiz mode. To start using the app students have to select a base or native language. After choosing a language students select a level of difficulty from beginner through advanced learner. Each activity has students type the infinitive, past tense, and participle of each verb. If students get stuck in the practice mode they can tap the help button to get the correct answer.

VerbBusters costs $1.99. It could be a good practice application for high school ELL students.

Kids Boats is an iPad app through which students discover animals of different climate zones. In Kids Boats students navigate a boat down a river avoiding obstacles and collecting stars. Along the river students will find animals native to the climate zone that the river is in. At the end of each river students will see the animals of that climate zone.

Students can make boats move through Kids Boats in three different ways. The simplest way to navigate the boats is to drag and move the boats. Students can tilt their iPads to make the boats move. The third way to make the boats move is to blow on the iPad (near the microphone) and the boats will move.

Healthy Heroes is a free iPad app designed to help children learn about healthy snacks and meals. In the free app students feed healthy foods to a friendly monster. Before each activity students are shown a few healthy foods and they’re told a bit about the nutrition and calories of the foods. Then in the activity students tap mystery boxes to find the snacks and drag them to the monster’s mouth. Between each activity a short, healthy eating tip is played for students to watch.

Healthy Heroes could be a great app to include in an elementary school lesson about health and nutrition.

Thanks to David Kapuler for sharing the app last week on his blog.