Week 5 Review: Goodreader for iPad
This week I chose to look over Steve Lai's blog Teaching with iPad. I decided to check out some of the apps he suggested for teachers. I hadn't ever heard of Goodreader and decided to check it out on his post Goodreader for iPad. Now, at face value it may seem pretty simple and unnecessary. What this app basically does is open almost any document file type, including powerpoint and excel files. It also works really well with Dropbox. After logging onto the Dropbox server you can download and access your documents anytime, anywhere. The same applies for GoogleDocs.
This app become Steve's favorite after spending the summer scanning all of his teacher guides, manuals, student workbooks, and pretty much anything else paper. He emailed all of these documents to himself through the scanner he was using, opened them with Goodreader and voila, they are automatically saved to your iPad. Then he renamed and organized them all into folders. Now, he has easy access to all of his scripts, songs, and manuals for the five grades he teaches. Below, is Steve's Goodreader. |
I think this app would be great to use to keep lessons organized. I could put the song files I want to play at the beginning of class in a folder along with my lesson plan for the day, any worksheets for the lesson, and the powerpoint presentation that I'm going to be using. Plus, no more messy binders and tons of papers floating all over the place that are hard to keep track of. Also, you can mark on the documents! This means you can have students send an assignment to you, you can open it in Goodreader, mark what is wrong/needs fixed, and then send it right back to the student. You can annotate or freehand write. This may seem like a inconsequential detail, but you can also zoom in on any document, which could be very helpful for a map on a field trip or a fine print document.
Another great quality of this app is that you can easily switch back and forth between documents by clicking on the tabs at the top of the page. Personally, not being able to go between multiple documents when working on projects is one of my greatest frustrations when it comes to iPads. This app will definitely help with that. I can't wait to try it. This is a great app and a fantastic teacher tool. The one downside is that it does cost money ($4.99), but it is worth it to have everything saved in one place where you can access it no matter what. Unfortunately, it is only available on the App Store right now. There is an iPad and iPhone app though. Goodreader also has a website which goes into details about the various features, has a manual available, and troubleshooting pages.
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