This week I am in Cape Cod with my wife's family, including our two toddler nieces.  They have enjoyed playing with my iPad (supervised of course) and I have enjoyed seeing which apps they like interacting with the most.  Here are two they have liked so far:

iWriteWords (Free)
I wrote about this app that I learned about from Seth Bowers.  My 2 1/2 year old niece really enjoyed tracing and identifying the letters.  The only part she needed help (i.e. she didn't understand it) with was tilting the iPad so that the letter blocks fall into the "vortex."

3D Drum Kit for iPad ($2.99)
I got a couple of iTunes gift cards for my birthday, so I have been purchasing more apps than I normally might.  The ones that I have been most interested in are the musical instrument and production applications.  Both my 2 1/ year old and 20 month old nieces have liked smashing this drum kit.  It has an easy to use recording interface and a couple of different drum kit sounds.  The drum kit is animated, unlike other drum kit or drum pad apps that just play the sounds.

Seth Bowers shared a bunch of great iPad resources for educators this past week.  Here are a couple that have to do with English and literacy:
 

iWriteWords is a well designed app for early childhood students learning how to form letters and put the letters into words.  There is a free "Lite" version as well as a paid version that has some additional features.

StoryKit is an interesting app that lets you rewrite the words to classic stories such as Three Little Pigs, Humpty Dumpty, and Three Bears.  Users can also create their own story books by using pictures saved on the device or user generated drawings.  Text can be typed on on each page along with sound effects or narration.  This could be great for early elementary aged students

Shakespeare is a robust free app that has most (all?) of Shakespeare's plays available in an easy to navigate and read setup.  Each play contains synopses , descriptions of characters, and the complete scenes.  The Pro edition ($9.99) contains portraits, a glossary, famous quotes and facts, and the ability to mark the patterns of words (e.g. Iambic Pentameter) on the screen.

Seth Bowers also shared a list of iPad resources (work in progress) that I plan to regularly check.

Kids Draw by neu.Pen LLC is a drawing program that allows users to record the drawings in progress (screencast) and save and email drawings.  The interface is pretty simple and it makes good use of the iPad screen size.  Best of all, it's completely free!

So far I have found two pretty good Periodic Table of Elements (PTE) apps available for free for iPads,  One is called 'Periodic Table of Elements' and is made by Kevin Neelands.  It has your basic information including the oribitals, states, and a diagram of the electrons and protons.  It also has a simple way of grouping the elements visually by metal, melting point, boiling point, and native state.

Another, more elegantly designed PTE is EMD Chemicals 'EMD PTE.'  It has a more refined color palette and navigation system.  It also contains more detailed information per element.  EMD PTE has a really nice classification system where you can choose different filters to apply to the table to see which elements fall under certain categories.

Both tables would be great for any middle school science class or high school chemistry class.

I'm still a little fuzzy on how Project Gutenberg works, both financially and legally, but they have made a ton of books including many classics, available for free as eBooks.  These can be downloaded to the iBooks library.  The iBooks application has some really nice features for books that have been setup as eBooks including table of content hyperlinks, highlight and copy text, highlight text with a marker, look up words in a dictionary, take notes in the text, and search for other instances of text within the book.  I'm amazed at how powerful this standard app is and I am curious to how it might be used  in addition to or as an alternative to the physical book.

I recently acquired an iPad and have been thoroughly enjoying it thus far.  I've been spending hours on the App store looking for (free) resources that might have potential in schools.  I started a list of my findings and asked some of my colleagues to contribute to it as well. Over the several weeks I'll add a bunch of posts that include my findings.