This changes everything!

Here's another neat iPhone app suggested by Sue Gannon. Teacher's Pick, available for $0.99 on the App Store, allows teachers to randomly choose students and even keeps track of who's been selected already. A touch of a button resets the whole class. Thanks, Sue!

Without a doubt, the best app I've seen so far for creating and/or editing documents on the iPad is the $14.99 Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite for iPad. What makes it so great? Well, like its name suggests, it allows you to create and edit MS Office documents such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint right on your iPad. In addition, it allows you to view PDF files, images, and other formats like TXT, HTM, HTML and RTF.

But wait--it gets even better! The 'connect' in Quickoffice Connect refers to the many ways in which the app allows you to move data on and off the iPad, including a built-in web server that provides a unique address that can be entered into any web browser to allow you to download and upload files directly from the iPad!

Even better than that? Quickoffice Connect allows you to choose from several cloud-based storage solutions such as Google Docs, Apple's MobileMe, or even Dropbox. You heard correctly--you can access your Dropbox data directly from within Quickoffice Connect!

To round it all out, a built-in e-mail client allows you to attach and send documents directly from within the app. Native printing to network printers will likely be made possible by the much-anticipated November update to iOS 4.2.

Click here to check out Quickoffice Connect on the iTunes App Store.

Wondering about this 'cloud-based computing' you keep hearing about? Download the Dropbox iPad app and get ready for the revolution! Dropbox is a cloud-based storage utility, which is just a fancy way of saying it's a place for you to store your documents on the Internet, safely and securely. And for free, no less!

Using Dropbox is as easy as 1, 2, 3: 1) Set up a Dropbox account*. 2) Download the Dropbox iPad app. 3) You can immediately begin using it to save documents from your iPad. But the real magic starts to happen when you download the Dropbox desktop application for your Mac or PC, at school or home or both. Now you can drop files into your Dropbox from any of your computers and have those files instantly available on your iPad! That's pretty cool. Did I mention that it's free?

Textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced yesterday the launch of the first-ever full-curriculum Algebra app for the iPad. The app, titled HMH Fuse: Algebra 1, runs on the newly developed HMH Fuse, an interactive platform for mobile devices like the iPad. Check out the full press release for more information. Click here for more info about HMH Fuse: Algebra 1, including a video demo of the app running on an iPad.

The app is part of a pilot program with four California school districts. The program will place 400 iPads in six different schools. Additional articles about the pilot program can be found here, here, here, and here.

Check out this article about iOS 4.2 which is coming to the iPad in November. iOS 4.2 will bring a host of new features, including the long-awaited ability to print directly from apps! The last line of the article says it all: The iPad will be able to print to networked printers or printers connected to your computer, details TBD.

Today I've added three more teachers into the iPad Test Drive. Welcome to Rhonda Martineau (Title I Reading, Lemmer), Todd Goymerac (Special Ed, Webster), and Carl Brunngraeber (5th Grade, Middle School). That brings the total number of iPads in the district to twenty-five!

This is going to be an exciting year!

Not sure if Inkling is the first e-textbook app for iPad, but it's the first I've seen. Click here to check it out. The best part? It's a free app that allows you to register and access some demo textbook content. If this is the future, I'm liking the looks of it!

Click to go Back to School shopping on the App Store! Apple has assembled a ton of great educational apps, all broken down by subject. Remember, all apps in the App Store will work with your iPad including iPhone and iPod touch apps.

I found a great series of posts about iPad apps for the classroom over on The iPad Fan blog. There's some good info on math and science apps as well as a look at a few note-taking apps. Check out all four posts here: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4

And here's another great post from the good folks at IEAR.org about using iPads in the classroom.

By now you may have used your iPad to create a document or two that you'd like to print. Even if you haven't, there's always going to be an e-mail or photo or something that you need to make a hard copy of. Strangely, according to Apple, printing is not yet supported on the iPad!

The truth is, while there doesn't appear to be a single perfect way to do it, several recent articles on the web have broken down some good (and not-so-good) ways to print from the iPad. Check them out here, here, and here.

And if all else fails, there's always the low-tech approach:

The I Education Apps Review blog, or IEAR.org for short, is a great place to visit for reviews and information about apps that are suitable for education. The apps are graded in categories such as Purpose, Program Functionality, and Overall Educational Value. The reviews on this site cover apps for iPhone, iPod touch, as well as iPad. The good news is that your iPad will run all of these apps! Check it out here: http://www.iear.org/