So you finally broke down and bought your teenager a smartphone? After the empty promises to make beds and take out trash fade into humorous memories, maybe you can encourage your budding scholar to get some use from the device beyond playing Angry Birds and sending record numbers of monthly text messages. Here are three great apps that help make the phone actually seem worth the money.
Merriam-Webster (free, Android and iPhone) – Yes, your kid should have a dictionary app on his phone, and it won’t make him a nerd. It wouldn’t kill him to spell the occasional word correctly on his school assignments. The app allows users to search by voice (it correctly and quickly found temptation, dichotomy, and verisimilitude when I tested the voice search feature) and by entering the word with the phone’s keyboard. Suggestions pop up as the user types in a word, but if a misspelled word is entered no matches will be returned, and I found that surprising. When I entered recieve, reccomend, and mispell, three common student mistakes, I got a no matches found message in each case. The Merriam-Webster web site does offer suggestions for misspelled words, so hopefully future updates will fix this. Screen tabs like Recent, Favorites, and Daily (today’s word was crucible) round out the offerings. This is an easy-to-use, functional tool. Merriam-Webster is a big name in the dictionary world, and this app does not disappoint.
Evernote (free, Android and iPhone) – This popular note-taking app lets users create and organize notes into notebooks in a variety of ways. Notes can be typed in or recorded by voice recorder. Photos, audio files and text files can be attached to a note. Notes can be searched by keyword or by user-created tags. Additionally, if the user creates a free account at http://www.evernote.com/, notes and notebooks created on the phone app will automatically be synched to the online account. Evernote’s slogan is Remember Everything, and this fun and useful app will help students do exactly that.
United States Constitution (by Ken Hunt) (free, Android only) – Many states require students to pass a test on the U.S. Constitution, and this app serves as a great study tool. All articles and amendments are included, as is a table of contents. The information is searchable as well. The app also contains some fun extras such as the text of important historical documents like the Gettysburg Address, the Mayflower Compact and Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. One nice touch I enjoyed was the inclusion of notes about the “creative” spelling found in the constitution. Not long on fanciness or bells-and-whistles, this app simply contains useful information, and teachers and students will appreciate some of the things the designer had the foresight to include. Students taking history or civics classes will find lots to like about this app.
Note: These apps were tested on the HTC Incredible.