I learned some other important things today:

1. Before purchasing an app, we need to consider the capabilities, the cost, potential time saving, and the value of the learning experience.

2. We also need to consider if there are alternative ways of doing the same thing for free.

Working my way down my list I found that iTeachPhysics app is pretty much useless. No quizzes, tutorials, or anything that would engage a student in learning. So the value of the learning experience is negligible as are the capabilities.

I downloaded iExploriments: Electricity-Simple Electric Circuits. It was fun to play around with, and I found myself thinking that it’s a grade school app that high school students could also gain some benefit from. Then I had a wonderful insight:

There are far better free circuit simulations available on websites. For example:

http://phet.colorado.edu/en/research

http://www.compadre.org/osp/

http://www.theuniverseandmore.com/

http://selene.cet.edu/

http://www.falstad.com/ripple/

Why spend money on simulation apps? Now I can cross off all of the simulation apps from my list.

The only problem is that the iPad does not support Flash or Java and cannot access any of these wonderful simulations YET. Let’s hope that these wonderful people who created these simulations will move them to HTML 5. In the meantime I will need to reserve the computer lab instead of the iPad cart when we do simulations.