From the classroom to the living room – The five best mobile apps for extracurricular learning
Teen Tech Week takes place from the 8th-12th March, so experts at Mobiles.co.uk have revealed the best apps to aid students in extra curricular learning:
Outside of regular school hours it is beneficial for children to take on extra learning and support. Instead of splashing out on a tutor, there are various apps that can aid school studies or even be used pick up a completely new subject.
To help parents swat up on subjects they might have forgotten from their school days, or give their children easy-to-access educational resources, online smartphone retailer, e2save, has curated the best educational apps you can start using in seconds.
- BBC Bitesize (available for iOS, Android)
The popular GCSE BBC learning tool is packed full of resources across a large variety of core subjects within the school curriculum. With a variety of learning methods, such as flashcards and videos, there’s plenty to keep children engaged in their studies and the interface is easy to navigate on mobile or tablet.
By using this free app, you have all the exam specific learning material available at your fingertips, with exam level interactive quizzes to help parents keep their year 10 and 11 students on track whilst they’re unable to attend school.
- Photomath (available for iOS, Android)
Maths is often the Achilles heel of students and adults alike, especially when it comes to getting your head around complex equations and theory. To aid any parent struggling to help their children with maths lessons or homework, the simple to use Photomath app is free and allows you to scan in live images of your maths problems using your phone camera to help solve them.
The app comes with a step-by-step tutorial of how to upload the images and then offers a number of logical solutions for the maths problem for you to work through. Whether it’s addition and subtraction, multiplication, fractions or even trigonometry, this app will help you find easy to understand solutions for maths at every level, and understand the theory behind it, with no internet access or data usage required.
- Duolingo (available for iOS, Android)
Learning a new language is difficult enough, but without the help of teachers and official learning material, the process becomes much harder for parents to replicate at home. Duolingo is a free app that allows students access to bite sized lessons to practice speaking, reading and writing in more than 35 languages.
Duolingo is suitable for any ability, starting from as young as primary school age, right through to teaching adults for business and travel purposes. The app allows you to log and track your progress each session, making organising learning around other subjects effortless.
- TED-ed (available for iOS, Android)
TED-ed has been developed to allow educators and teachers around the world to submit succinct, easy to follow lessons on virtually any subject at the touch of a button. All videos uploaded have been refined to make sure they are less than 10 minutes long and are combined with high quality, fun animations to ensure children are kept engaged throughout.
This app is available for free and parents can use it to replicate virtual lessons on subjects and specific topics. If your child is struggling with a particular problem in English for example, which you may not be equipped to solve, you can find the solution on TED-ed, providing a virtual teacher in the absence of the classroom environment.
- Epic! (available for iOS, Android)
Epic! gives you access to a digital library of 40,000 high quality e-books and audiobooks, as well as learning videos and interactive quizzes suitable for children as young as nursery level, right through to start of secondary school.
The app is designed to be as easy to navigate as possible, allowing parents to set their children up with easy access to their favourite stories and new books to help them develop their reading and literacy skills. Epic! also hands out progress badges to keep children engaged and excited to read. The app is free for schoolteachers and librarians but will be free on a one-month trial for parents too, paying just £5.85 a month thereafter.
Andrew Cartledge, mobile expert at e2save, commented:
“For many young children and their parents, they are keen to continue learning outside of the classroom and further develop their knowledge.
“While parents may have studied many of the subjects their children do whilst they were at school, being relied on to help with maths, English literature or even modern languages can be a daunting prospect.
“However, these handy apps are readily available for anyone with access to a smartphone or tablet and will certainly be a real help to parents to organise and support their children’s studies, creating a virtual classroom at home in lockdown.”
Responses