The 5 best iPad apps for PE teachers

Chuck Milsap, Washington State’s 2011 Elementary Physical Education Teacher of the Year, shares his top 5 apps for PE teachers:

There are thousands of Physical Education-related apps to load on your iPad. My general belief is that the best apps are ones that can be customized to work for your specific student population. The following are 5 apps that I have found helpful in a variety of ways:

ChoiceBoard Creator (free): This app allows you to customize your own collection of picture choices for kids. Customize up to 6 pictures per screen and add sound effects. This app works great for choice time, teaching skill progression with pictures, communication with students with special needs and for customizing your own student assessments.

Show Me (free): This free app features an interactive white board that allows you to record your voice while you create images. You can even draw over any backdrop (a picture of your playground, gym, etc…). Simply save your creations and replay for your students when needed. This works perfectly for modeling games and more.

Labelbox (free): Use this app to quickly project an image with text. This works especially well as a warm up board when your kids enter the gym or to quickly highlight a specific skill, behavior, etc using pictures and text.

TempoPerfect (free): At first I thought this app wouldn’t be very exciting. I was wrong! This app allows you to set a tempo according to beats per minute (metronome). This works great for teaching kids about the heart, including what your heart rate sounds like at 60 BPM versus 200 BPM. Also, students can try to step to the pace of the tempo. This will allow your students to maximize steps per minute as you steadily increase the tempo.

SecondsPro ($2.99): This is the best timer app that I have seen so far. Create your own interval workouts, complete with customizable color backgrounds and song selection. Students will appreciate the large timer display and an occasional rest interval between exercise sets.

3 thoughts on “The 5 best iPad apps for PE teachers

  1. Pingback: - Hooray for Specials!

  2. Do you know of an app that you can create a rubric and they tap on the screen to grade. A fellow teacher of mine uses assessmate but they no longer have the app to download. I basically want to create a PE rubric with categories, weight them and at the end of each class a performance grade is scored. If you know of a few I can look at, please pass along.

    Jay

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *