- Augusto loves to teach his daughter with an iPad:
- Michael also lets his children play and learn on the iPad:
- A few noteworthy apps we use very often
- You learn, you grow… with the iPad.
Without a doubt, the iPad excels as a learning machine. There are so many educative titles for everyone to enjoy and learn from. And it doesn’t apply just to the adults. We’re both fathers and we want our children to learn as much as possible as well. It’s even better if they can learn while they are playing.
Augusto loves to teach his daughter with an iPad:
“The number of educational apps for the iPad is incredible. My daughter is reading books and playing with apps that teach her how to write, read and think. I even noticed some apps are growing with her as she develops more skills and knowledge.
Adults are served well, too. Apart from the iTunes University, which has an incredible amount of knowledge available, there are apps to help you acquire any skill. I mentioned many times in this book that you can learn how to touch-type on the iPad’s screen with the TapTyping app. Now that I got my iPad Mini, I’m using this app again to improve my speed on the smaller screen. The progress I’m making is amazing. All thanks to this app.”
Michael also lets his children play and learn on the iPad:
“My children use the iPad to learn to write, read, do puzzles, build robots and do other amazing stuff. I encourage you to find out more about the apps that can help your children learn something today.
As for me, apps like TapTyping or Reading Trainer help me improve the skills I know I need to improve.”
Here’s just a short list of the applications both we and our kids use for learning on the iPad. There are many more. Be sure to do some research and find the ones that suit you best:
- TapTyping
- Reading Trainer
- iBooks
- Kindle
- TED
- Bob Books
- First Words (English and Spanish)
- Montessori Alphabet
- Montessori Words
- Math Garden
- Intro to letters
- Khan Academy
- Where’s My Water
- iReading Books
- ABC Magnetic Toys
- JumpStart my ABC
- Sandra Boynton’s Books/apps
- Doctor Seuss’ Books/Apps
- TocaBoca games
A few noteworthy apps we use very often
We’ll finish this chapter by diving a little deeper into the apps we particularly like and use a lot.
TapTyping
We use this app to learn to touch-type on both the external keyboard as well as the on-screen keyboard of the iPad.
Michael was totally blown away by this app:
“While I already knew how to touch-type before my switch to the iPad, I managed to improve my writing speeds by training on the external keyboard.
But what really struck me was that I could actually learn how to touch type on the on-screen keyboard of the iPad! When Augusto recommended this app to me I couldn’t believe it, but the results I got were amazing.
When I started, I could type 20 WPM (words per minute) on the on-screen keyboard vs 60 WPM on the external keyboard. Now I can type up to 70 WPM on the external keyboard vs 50 WPM on the on-screen keyboard! Almost as fast! All thanks to this app.”
Augusto is convinced everyone should take their time to learn how to type:
“I think the ability to type fast is one of the most useful tricks that one can do to improve their productivity. I dedicated an entire chapter to this in my book ‘25 Tips for Productivity’. Just think about it, you can easily double or even triple your writing speeds, saving you hours each day.
TapTyping was the solution I took to learn to type on the screen of the iPad. I was really slow, to the point that I even considered getting rid of the iPad if I could not solve that problem. I started practicing and learned some really cool tricks in the process.
I am not as fast on the screen as I am with a keyboard, but I can type more than 60 words per minute on the screen of the iPad.”
ReadQuick
The idea behind Read Quick is that it shows you only one word on the screen at a time. Augusto likes this app a lot:
“This interesting concept worked much better on my iPad Mini than the regular iPad for one simple reason: weight. As with many of the things I tried, just reading one word on the screen helped me tremendously in regards to staying focused. ReadQuick connects with Instapaper inbox where I can read my ‘saved for later’ articles through the app. It also measures the speed of my reading and gives me an estimate of how much time it will take me to read an article. This serves me really well as I am constantly under-estimating my reading time.”
TED
We both love TED talks and have been listening to them for years. It’s great that they have a fantastic app for the iPad. Over the last few years TED grew and they licensed people to do TEDx in many cities all over the world (TEDx is an independent TED event). We both were invited to speak at TEDx events -Michael in 2010 at TEDx Warsaw and Augusto in 2013 at TEDx Fort Wayne.
TED talks have a special place on our iPads, we watch them mostly for inspiration. The application allows us to save favorite talks, share them, save them for watching offline and even to retrieve a random talk.
With TED talks you learn and are inspired to aim a little higher. To get out of your comfort zone. To reach for more. With this app, our iPad becomes our ‘inspiration device’.
You learn, you grow… with the iPad.
There are so many titles for learning on the iPad that it’d be impossible for us to review them all here. That’s why we encourage you to dig deeper and find the apps that will help you and your kids grow, learn and get inspired.
There is a scene in the movie ‘Matrix’ when Neo asks Trinity if she knows how to fly a helicopter and she says she doesn’t… yet. And then they upload a program directly to her brain and she instantly has the skills to fly the machine. This is how we feel about the iPad. Do you want to learn something? Well, ‘there is an app for that’.