For Your Consideration: 6 Top iPad Apps

After attending the ISTE convention last month, we've been reminded time and again that this year's hot piece of educational tech is the iPad. Students want it. Parents love it. Teachers use it. I wish I had it...

Best of all, it works. The iPad offers a wealth of educational opportunities, most of them geared to be flashy, fun, and rewarding. We've compiled a short list of some of the most popular educational apps being downloaded and used right now. Each of the apps below appears on the July 27 edition of appannie's Top Charts for Educational iPad apps (check out the full chart here)

FREE APPS

1. Era of Dino HD Lite

What student - or parent for that matter, don't lie - doesn't want to learn more about dinosaurs? This free app will introduce users to over 300 different dinos. Also covered are the specific eras in which these creatures lived. Slick, colorful graphics complement a wealth of interesting material. (Average rating: 4.5 stars)

2. NASA App HD

Take a tour of the galaxy - and beyond - with this fascinating app from NASA. Official video and imagery (some of which are live) enhance in-depth explorations of planets, stars, current missions, and more. Children and adults alike will lose hours in this virtual solar system. (Average rating: 4.5 stars)

3. ScreenChomp

This versatile teaching tool is like having a digital whiteboard at your fingertips. Create your own lessons with the intuitive interface. Math problems, Venn diagrams, brainstorming webs - this app can handle them all. Even cooler is the ability to record and upload your lessons to the app's website or Facebook. (Average rating: 5 stars)

PAID APPS

1. Stack the States

Students can learn about each of the United States of America with this fun app. By the time they're finished, they'll be familiar with state capitals, shapes, and locations. Bonus games, full-color pictures, and tons of questions are included. (Average rating: 5 stars)

2. Math Bingo

This popular app will make math practice much more entertaining. A balance of fun gaming and rich educational content has landed Math Bingo on several top-app lists. It's simple - students must answer math problems correctly in order to complete rows on a Bingo chart. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are included. (Average rating: 4.5 stars)

3. Alphabet Fun

Invaluable for early learners, Alphabet Fun teaches and reinforces letter and number recognition and formation. It also teaches users to recognize and identify colors. Pronunciations provide clarity and speaking practice. (Average rating: not available)

What do you think of the iPad? Are you using it with your children or students? Have you tried any of the apps above? Do you know any other must-haves? Start the discussion in the comments section below!

Turning Great Ideas into Books: Part Two

When last we left Project Genius, it was a stack of paper. The content was there, lovingly penned by Jonathan Gross. Time to slap the pages on a spine, sandwich 'em between two flashy covers, and mass-produce those babies...right?

Not so fast, dear reader. Before any of the above can take place, Project Genius has to undergo a little something called editorial. Read on to learn all about it (and about Jonathan squirming under the relentless onslaught of the all-powerful Red Pen).

PART TWO:

Ream of Paper + Editorial = Shiny (and Grammatically Correct!) Shelf-Ready Content

The process of creating a book is a lot like taking a flight. First, you have to pack - you gather all of the things you want to have with you when you arrive at your final destination. You shove all of these items into a suitcase - this is like a completed manuscript. It contains all of the material an author wants to reach a teacher or child.

But you can't just hop onto your plane and take off, can you? You must first pass through security. This process confirms that you are aircraft-ready - you aren't carrying any prohibited items, your credentials check out, your socks don't smell overly offensive... In the same sense, editorial confirms that a manuscript is shelf-ready. Over the course of an editorial review, a manuscript will be scrutinized for prohibited items (misspellings, typos, incorrections), acceptable credentials (national and state standards, focused and grade-appropriate content), and even smelly socks (less-than-acceptable writing, overdone prose, wrong answers).

By the time the manuscript enters the terminal that is design and production, LEP is certain that the content within is complete, correct, and valuable to our customers. The editorial process ascertains that our words are ready to fly into developing minds around the world.

So...what actually happens? Well, once we have a completed manuscript in our hands, we submit it to a professional editor. Depending on a project's focus, we might give it to a number of additional experts and so-called beta-readers. These include subject experts, teachers, and parents. These reviewers have a specific amount of time to read, analyze, and suggest revisions or corrections.

It's at this point that the infamous Red Pen enters the fray. Well, it might be blue...or green...or pink - you get the idea. The editor combs through a manuscript's pages and marks his or her changes in a variety of keywords, symbols, and shapes (seriously, we publishers could probably found a worldwide language of our own).

The collectively tattooed project is then sent back to us for an internal review. We must consider every change. Some are obviously necessary (2 plus 2 will never equal 5, for instance; and George Washington is highly unlikely to have lived until 1899). Other suggested changes must be debated by our team. Do we want to remove a particular block of text to make an activity simpler? Does this page's language need to be raised to a more challenging caliber?

Ultimately, we make the revisions that we must, as well as those we feel make the project better. It's not uncommon for a manuscript to loop through the internal review more than once. We are trying to create the best product possible, after all. It can be difficult to move something on, giving up our ability to make adjustments and slight improvements.

But the show must go on. When that time comes, we fully approve a manuscript's content. It passes through the last scanning device, its words not to be patted down again. It strolls into the production terminal, leaving Red Pen and its endless supply of ink behind. It glances at the departure time monitors and finds the flight scheduled to land in Book Land. It heads for Gate D: Design. But that's a story for another day...

Stay tuned for our exploration of Project Genius's design process. We'll explain how the words take on a final shape, how they acquire pictures and graphics, and reveal the faces and creative minds behind our stunning covers.

And now, for your entertainment, we present Jonathan Gross: Reactions to His Edited Manuscript.

Calling All Classrooms

I bought my first cell phone at the age of 18, a few years behind most people my age. It took me a few weeks to familiarize myself with all the bells and whistles, which, compared to the model I use today, were next to nothing and unimpressive to boot. Nearly a decade after that first egg-shaped, no-color-screen model, I use my phone for just about everything: I send and receive e-mails, network with friends and coworkers, keep track of my budget; heck, I even place the occasional call or two. I'm not alone in having my mobile device practically bolted to my hand. Students, from elementary-level to college- and university-goers, use cell phones each and every day.

Sure, students use their cell phones to text, game, and Tweet. But the usage isn't limited to frivolous social communication and idle entertainment. Students are also using these devices to help them learn. They are using built-in calculators to help solve math problems, search engines to find sources for research papers, and teacher-recommended apps to train and challenge the mind. Some school districts are even using cell phones to help students perform well on standardized tests.

Yes, there are many negative possibilities when phone usage is permitted in a classroom. Distraction is perhaps the worst. Teachers have to either patrol the aisles like a hungry hawk or trust their students to stay away from Facebook and Angry Birds. Using technology moves away from more traditional, proven methods of education and encourages a turn-to-technology-for-everything environment. These are just a couple issues in an angry sea full of potential difficulties and complications.

It is a sea upon which we must set sail. The simple fact is that cell phones (and tablets like the iPad along with them) are too prevalent and potent to ignore. Thinking back to my archaic school days (the nineties), I wish I could open a rift in time and drop my phone into the youthful me's bulky backpack. Equipped with this space-age technology, younger me would have an entire new world of possibilities before him. He could schedule testing and project due dates. He could choose a list of books to check out from the library rather than scratching his head baffling over the Dewey Decimal System. He could download games that helped him practice in an effort to correct a persistent difficulty with math skills.

Oh, what might have been!

The students of today don't have to lament a lack of possibilities, nor wait until they're 18 years old to discover them. The world little me didn't have already surrounds them. The tools for a deeper and more effective education exist. Let's put them in the hands of our students and start soaring.

Turning Great Ideas into Books: Part One

Lorenz Educational Press is proud to possess more than 800 print titles in its library. When scanning our shelves, it's difficult not to think about the hard work that went into each and every page within each and every spine; impossible to imagine the quantities of people who made all of those books come to rest there.

Our products go through a remarkable process from start to finish. We thought you might be interested in learning more about that process. We'd like to introduce you to some of the talented individuals behind the pages, and prove to you that we do more than sit around and blog about education. To that end, we present part one of how we make an educational resource for you and your students.

PART ONE: Turning an Idea into a Ream of Paper

It all starts with an idea that is had somewhere by someone. These ideas are put down on paper and built upon. Pretty soon, they have metamorphosed into a manuscript. These manuscripts come to LEP from all over the country (and sometimes across borders). They are looked at by a panel of esteemed minds (ahem, us...along with an invaluable collection of educators). The best and brightest are chosen to become a part of our product line.

Whittling the forest of manuscripts down to the tallest and most robust trees is a difficult and all-important task. You might say that it's our most important job - making certain that we choose and produce the finest possible products for teachers, parents, and, of course, students. A lot goes into the review and selection process: how unique a resource is, its correlation with national and state standards, its versatility, value, and reusability for both educator and educated, the fun factor...the list is long, and no item can afford to be missed. When we choose our future products, the selections have been through an assembly line of study and approval.

Every once in a very long while, we have ideas resulting from our own research that are deemed brilliant enough to be seen by our discerning audience (you). For this post, we've selected one such idea. To avoid spoilers about this soon-to-be publishing sensation, we'll call it Project Genius. As in, this book will help turn your students into geniuses. This idea was given to Jonathan Gross, an LEP employee who fancies himself a competent writer (the comments section is entirely open to debate this notion).

Jonathan locked himself in his office for two weeks, surfacing only for increasingly potent mugs of coffee and do-or-die staff meetings. He emerged bearded and triumphant, wielding a completed manuscript of Project Genius. What had started as an idea had become a reality of inked pages. But it still has a long way to go on the road to Book Land...

Jonathan before writing Project Genius...

...and after writing.

Tune in next week for part two of Project Genius's journey to the shelf. You'll get to discover what a manuscript goes through when under editorial scrutiny, when a product is considered finished from a written standpoint, and just how terrifying a red pen can be. Fire away with any questions you might have in the comments section below!