That's Baloney! - A Fun Trivia Game for Kids

Parts of this post originally appeared on my other blog, iPadApps4School.com

That’s Baloney! is a free iPad app designed to engage elementary school students in fun games about science, language arts, math, and social studies facts. The app has levels appropriate for students in grades two through six. The concept behind the games is a simple one; a statement is shown to the student and he or she has to decide if it’s “baloney” or if it’s true. The games is over after four incorrect choices or after answering all questions correctly. Students are shown a summary of correct and incorrect answers at the end of each game.

Applications for Education
Four players can play That’s Baloney! on the same iPad. Playing a few rounds of That’s Baloney! could be a fun way to get students to try to recall information from previous lessons. It’s also the kind of educational app that parents and children can use together.

A Couple of Tools That Make It Easy to Track Tasks

Last night I answered an email from a reader named Melissa who had a question that I'm asked on a fairly regular basis so I thought that I would my response into a blog post. Her question was,

"I was wondering if you knew of any way for students to track and mark off their learning tasks as they go throughout the day. I just want a really easy to-do list that my kids can easily 'check off' as they go and see how much they have accomplished."

There were two options that immediately came to mind when I read Melissa's question. First, was StrikeApp. Strike App is a simple to-do list creation and management tool. To use Strike App just title your list of things to do and start typing your list. When you've completed a task just come back and strike it out by clicking on it, dragging it off the screen, or "x-ing" it out. You can share your to-do lists by sending people the link to your list. For those people who like to experiment with different backgrounds and themes, Strike App offers a handful of designs to choose from.

The second option that I recommended to Melissa was FetchNotes. Fetchnotes is a neat service for creating and keeping notes online. Fetchnotes uses an interface for creating and sharing notes that will feel familiar to Twitter users. When you write a note, just use a hashtag to label your note. Then whenever you want to search for a note just enter a hashtag. For example, if I was a student taking notes in a history course I might use the hashtag "#revolution" for all notes related to revolutions. Then I could go back and read all of my notes about revolution by just searching for that hashtag. When you want to share a note with someone in your contacts you can do so by just putting "@" before the person's name. Fetchnotes works on the web and offers Android and iOS apps.