I'll be very lucky to scratch the surface on this topic. The topics will be narrowed down the elementary school: Use of an itouch by multiple students while in a library. Let's see there's Facebook Chat (this amends 2Thing#5), ibluetouch for mind mapping your thoughts while on the go, WeDict for a quick dictionary reference, Ifbyphone to collaborate amongst students, Stanza for digital books, as well as Classics and Bookshelf, Word of the Day, Wikipanion to get to the class's wikispace. Geopedia (finding places) and WorldCat (finding books in a nearby library) are two other freebie tools than can be used in elementary classrooms.
After looking at another section with actual game-like activities in language arts and math I want to conclude that I might just "play around in the sand castle" of the librarian on some of the apps she sees students benefiting from. After a trip to the Apple store to play around with an itouch and education apps, as well as talking with a store salesman, maybe I will have better sea legs.
Further investigation suggests that Stanza and Bookshelf will be helpful to students in that they can enhance literature that is in hard copy in the library. While working on a project in the library, students have greater resources of literature in their hands by using either Stanza or Bookshelf.
This starts to scratch the surface, but I don't think there will ever be a comprehensive list of apps for education. There are so many out there and more come out every day. Then some are free and some are not. And if you want a paid one, how does a school manage that? There are lots of things out there, but it takes a little bit of thought to decide how to use them.
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