The following is a list of iPad apps for use in middle school learning environments. Updated May 2024.

All Subjects/General/Productivity

• Keynote — A slideshow presentation program
• Pages — A word processing program
• Numbers — A spreadsheet application
• iBooks — a ereader book store
• iStudiez Pro — calendar and assignment planner
• Mobile Mouse — Mobile Mouse instantly transforms your iPad into a wireless mouse and trackpad for your computer
• PrintCentral — View, store, and print from the iPad
• OmniGraffle — Brainstorming, diagraming, charts, graphic design, etc.
• PDF Reader Pro Edition – PDF reader

Note Taking

• Notability — This popular app allows handwritten notes, typing, audio recording, annotation of PDFs/documents, and organization into subjects/dividers. It has excellent organizational tools and integrates well with cloud services.
• GoodNotes 6 — A powerful note-taking app with handwriting recognition, PDF annotation, document scanning, and organizational tools like notebooks and dividers.
• Microsoft OneNote — Part of the Office suite, OneNote allows typed or handwritten notes, audio/video recording, web clipping, and seamless syncing across devices.
• Apple Notes — The built-in notes app on iPad offers basic note-taking with typing, handwriting, checklists, document scanning, and iCloud syncing across Apple devices.
• Bamboo Paper — A simple handwriting and annotation app with a natural pen-and-paper feel. It has a minimalist interface and supports export to PDF/image formats.
• Evernote – A versatile note-taking app that allows text, handwriting, audio, file attachments, web clipping, and syncing across devices. It has robust organizational tools

Flash Cards

• Quizlet — One of the most popular flashcard apps. Students can create their own flashcard sets or access millions of existing sets. It has various study modes like flashcards, learn, write, spell, test, and games.
• Brainscape — Uses a smart flashcard system with spaced repetition and confidence-based repetition to optimize memorization. Offers pre-made decks and ability to create custom flashcards.
• Anki Pro — Employs spaced repetition to improve long-term retention. Highly customizable with advanced features for efficient studying.
• Flash Cards Flashcards Maker — Easy to add decks and cards, shuffle, sync with iCloud, share decks, format text, night mode, and swipe gestures for efficient studying.

Art

These apps cover a range of functionalities, from digital drawing and painting to art education, reference tools, and creative projects, making them valuable resources for middle school art classes.

• Art Creation and Drawing Apps

  • Adobe Fresco — A powerful drawing and painting app with layers, vector brushes, live brushes, and excellent stylus support. Suitable for ages 11-18.
  • Procreate — A professional-grade drawing and painting app with an intuitive interface, advanced brushes, and layering capabilities. Great for creating digital art.
  • SketchBook — A versatile sketching and painting app with a wide range of brushes, tools, and layer options for digital art.
  • ArtStudio — a professional drawing / painting application
  • ArtRage — painting and drawing tools that work just like the real thing!
  • Gravilux — an app that lets you draw with stars
  • Tayasui Sketches — A simple yet feature-rich drawing app with realistic brushes, blend modes, and an intuitive interface for sketching and painting.

  Art Learning and Reference Apps

  • Essential Anatomy 5 — Provides detailed 3D models of the human skeleton that can be rotated and zoomed for drawing references.
  • Handy Art Reference Tool — Offers reference images of hands, feet, and heads in various poses and angles, useful for figure drawing.
  • Grid# — Overlays a grid on any image, helping with proportions and scaling when drawing from references.

  Art Education and Creativity Apps

  • Book Creator — Enables creating digital books, portfolios, and visual stories, great for art projects and presentations.
  • Pic Collage — Useful for creating collages, mood boards, and artist research pages by combining images, text, and annotations.
  • Stop Motion Studio — Allows creating stop-motion animations, which can be used for creative storytelling and art projects.
  • Google Arts & Culture — Provides access to virtual tours of museums, art galleries, and exhibitions, fostering art appreciation and learning.

Astronomy

• GoSkyWatch Planetarium — Easily and quickly identify and locate stars, planets, constellations and more with a touch or by simply pointing to the sky. Have fun with family and friends discovering the images in the night sky. Go outside and explore the night sky
• Star Walk — An interactive astronomy guide
• Solar Walk — A 3D Solar System Model
• Distant Suns — A database of over 130,000 stars, nebula, and galaxies
• Spacecraft AR — An augmented reality app that lets you explore 3D models of various spacecraft, rockets, and satellites used in space exploration.
• NASA Visualization Explorer — Provides access to NASA’s collection of visualizations, animations, and imagery related to Earth, the solar system, and the universe.

Calculators

• MathStudio – MathStudio is the most comprehensive math app available for iPhone and iPad. Whether you need a simple calculator to do your finances or a replacement for your TI graphing calculator, MathStudio is the most powerful and versatile calculator available
• PocketCAS pro – Advanced Graphic and Symbolic Scientific Calculator. Handles every mathematical problem you might encounter in school or university
• PocketCAS lite – Free Graphic calculator. Not as many features as the pro version above
• Quick Graph – Free 2D and 3D graphing calculator

Electives/Other

• Magic Piano – Play timeless pieces on spiral and circular keyboards, or follow beams of light – mastery requires only imagination. Play alone, or travel through a warp hole and play Piano Roulette with other performers across the world

ESE Modifications/Accommodations

• Proloquo2Go — full featured alternative communication solution for people who have difficulty speaking
• Speak it! Text to Speech — Converts typed text into natural-sounding speech in over 30 languages. Useful for reading accommodation and ELL students.
• Google Translate — Provides instant translation between over 130 languages via text, voice, conversation mode, and camera translation for printed text.
• Apple Translate — Translate lets you quickly and easily translate your voice and text between languages. Designed to be the best and easiest-to-use app for translating phrases, conversations, and even the text around you.

Foreign Language

• BidBox Vocabulary Trainer: English – Spanish – Learn Spanish vocabulary
• English – Chinese Dictionary – The best Chinese English Dictionary app is now on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. It covers over 170,000 words and phrases of the contemporary Chinese language (Both Traditional and Simplified Chinese), along with example sentences, audio pronunciations, fastest search speed, flexible search methods, and more
• Duolingo — A gamified language learning app that makes learning fun through bite-sized lessons, stories, and rewards. Covers over 30 languages.
• Memrise — Uses mnemonic flashcards, games, and spaced repetition to help memorize words and phrases in various languages.
• Busuu — Provides comprehensive lessons with writing exercises, audio conversations, and feedback from native speakers.
• Drops — A visual language learning app that teaches vocabulary through illustrations and word associations in a game-like format.
• Clozemaster — Focuses on learning vocabulary and grammar through context-based fill-in-the-blank exercises.
• Tandem — Connects language learners with native speakers for language practice through text, audio, and video chat.
• Google Translate — Provides instant translation between over 130 languages via text, voice, conversation mode, and camera translation for printed text.
• Babbel — Offers structured lessons with speech recognition, games, and multimedia resources for learning vocabulary and grammar effectively.

Language Arts/Reading

• iBooks — a ereader book store
• Book Creator — Create your own iBooks right on the iPad. (Allows everything except video)
• Free Books — 51,305 books to read for free
• Dictionary.com – Dictionary & Thesaurus — A dictionary and a Thesaurus
• Literary Analysis Guide — Elements of literature are arranged graphically around three wheels (poetry, prose, and rhetoric)
• Kindle — Kindle is an eReader from Amazon.com
• Vocabulary.com — Adaptive learning app that teaches vocabulary words through engaging questions and games.
• Khan Academy — Offers grammar lessons, reading comprehension practice, and test prep aligned to Common Core standards.
• Shakespeare Pro — Complete works of Shakespeare. 41 plays, 154 sonnets, and 6 poems. All works can be cross searched for anything
• LitCharts — Link to LitCharts website. Each of the LitCharts are available on the iPad
• Overdrive/Libby — Allows students to borrow ebooks and audiobooks from their school or public library using their library card.
• Epic! — A digital library with over 40,000 high-quality children’s books, including audiobooks, read-to-me books, and books in Spanish.
• Newsela — Provides nonfiction reading material from various sources at 5 different reading levels, with quizzes and writing prompts.

Math

• Alge-Bingo — Develop your algebraic equation solving skills through playing a Bingo game. This game takes you step by step through the process of learning how to solve the most basic equation up through multiple-step equations
• The Ruler — measure things in inches or centimeters
• Fractals — Move and pinch fractals in real time
• Geometry Stash — Access the most commonly used theorems, postulates, and corollaries
• Photomath — Uses the camera to scan and solve printed math problems step-by-step, great for checking work.
• Geogebra — A powerful app for graphing, geometry, 3D modeling, and exploring math concepts dynamically.
• Math Master — Gamified app with levels and rewards for practicing arithmetic, fractions, algebra, and more.
• Prodigy Math Game — An engaging fantasy math game that aligns content to curricula and adjusts difficulty.
• Math Ref — Provides interactive models and visualizations for algebra, geometry, calculus, and more.
• Desmos Graphing Calculator — A versatile graphing utility with options to animate and explore graphs.

Music

• Magic Piano — Play the piano freestyle or on a spiral keyboard
• Air Harp — Strum and pluck the strings for a harp sound
• Perfect Ear — Helps develop relative pitch and ear training skills through interactive exercises and games.
• Earpeggio — Become a better musician! Master the identification of intervals, chords, scales and rhythms solely by hearing them. Earpeggio is an ear training app which lets you improve your musical hearing.
• Yousician — Provides structured lessons and games for learning guitar, bass, piano, ukulele, and singing with progress tracking.
• Tenuto — An interactive music theory app that covers notes, scales, intervals, chords, ear training, and more through lessons and exercises.
• Music Theory Pro — Comprehensive app with courses on music notation, rhythm, scales, intervals, chords, and ear training with customizable practice sessions.

Science

• EMD PTE — A highly interactive periodic table of elements
• Powers of Minus Ten — Allows you to interactively zoom into a human hand and explore it in a 3D environment
• The Elements: A Visual Exploration — Lets you experience the beauty and fascination of the building blocks of our universe in a way you’ve never seen before.
• Nova Elements — An interactive periodic table app exploring elements, compounds, and their physical properties.
• NASA — The official NASA app provides access to images, videos, mission information, news, and live TV broadcasts related to space exploration and Earth science.
• Bill Nye’s VR Space Lab — Step inside Bill Nye’s Space Lab and explore the cosmos with Bill Nye in this 85 piece activity set! Get ready to discover space in virtual reality and enjoy fun experiments with step-by-step instructions that come alive in augmented reality!
• Bill Nye’s VR Science Kit — Step into the lab with Bill Nye’s VR Science Kit and get ready to make some discoveries with 30 fun experiments that come alive in augmented and virtual reality! Bill will explain key scientific principles including chemical reactions, sound waves, oxidation and dive into crystals, volcanoes, slime and more.
• Science 8 — A quiz app covering middle school science concepts across multiple disciplines.
• Molecules — View and manipulate 3D renderings of molecules
• 3D Brain — Rotate and zoom around 29 interactive structures in the brain
• Vernier Video Physics — Take a video of an object in motion, mark its position frame by frame, and set up the scale using a known distance. Video Physics then draws trajectory, position, and velocity graphs for the object.
• Playground Physics — Utilizes the camera to analyze the motion of objects like balls for physics lessons.
• Learn Muscles : Anatomy Quiz & Reference — A great reference, testing and education tool. Includes 141 beautiful muscle images with name, action, origin, insertion and comments, plus audio pronunciation guide, a quiz maker, an action viewer and 6 short videos to create a rich learning experience
• Frog Dissection — A virtual frog dissection app

Social Studies

• Civil War America’s Epic Struggle — Civil War: America’s Epic Struggle Features over 1,000 high-res photos, more than an hour of multimedia presentations, in excess of 100 authentic maps, dozens of first hand accounts, and numerous text articles and biographies, it provides instantaneous access to information on every aspect of the war
• WORLD BOOK – This Day in History — Interactive multimedia calendar that features historical events for the day
• Declaration for iPad — A copy of the Declaration of Independence
• Constitution for iPad — A copy of the Constitution of the United States
• Mission US — Immersive game-based learning about the American Revolution, Civil War, and more.
• World History Maps — Interactive atlas with animated maps that bring historical events and civilizations to life.
• Win the White House — Win the White House challenges you to manage your own presidential campaign by debating timely issues, strategically raising funds, polling voters, launching media campaigns, and making personal appearances.
• Executive Command — “Ever wanted to be the President of the United States for a day? In Executive Command, you can be President for four years! Try to accomplish what you set as your agenda while facing the challenges and responsibilities that crop up along the way.
• Brief the Chief — Take on the job of advising the president through historical challenges by talking to people in and around the White House. Consult with confidants within the White House and use evidence-based reasoning to provide the president with counsel.
• Branches of Power — Interactive exploration of the three branches of U.S. government.

Technology and Coding

• Swift Playgrounds — Apple’s official app for learning to code in Swift, their modern programming language used for iOS app development. It provides interactive lessons, challenges, and the ability to create real apps.
• Kodable — Designed for kids, Kodable uses a maze-based approach to teach coding fundamentals through fun puzzles and games. It covers concepts like sequences, loops, and conditionals.
• Hopscotch — Hopscotch allows kids to create games, animations, and apps using a visual programming language. It focuses on creativity while teaching coding basics.