New iPad Apps Find!

There's an App for That!

Clip Art

If you're like me, "you're a baller on a budget." As a mother of 4 children, my husband and I both in education, our budget is a tight one. My short experience with creating activities on teachers pay teachers (just since the end of May) has left me wanting to buy cool clip art from my colleagues, but just not having the financial resources to do so- at least not yet. It's been difficult to create activities and find clip art that you can use for commercial reasons, but for free.

Well (patting myself on the back), I just found another resource to create teaching activities on a budget. There is an iPad app called "clipart".  The best part (insert drumroll here! )- It's absolutely free and you can search all of the clip art that is free on openclipart.com. This is domain-free clip art and requires no license. The app is very easy to use, you simply do a search on the item you want. Some items will have several pages so it's important to swipe to find all of the clip art that's available. When you find what you want, the next step is just as simple!

You save the desired image to iPhoto, (there is an email looking icon at the lefthand bottom corner of the app). Then you open up iPhoto and email it to yourself. If you need to edit in anyway, you can purchase a drawing app (I prefer ArtStudio myself-$4.99) and edit in one of the many drawing apps available in the app store! If not just download it from your email account and there you have it!

** A very important quick note** There is a drawback to the app. The app sends the pictures to iPhoto as a jpeg, which means a white background- horrible if your background is not white , and  jpegs can cause some ugly distortion when you're trying to resize. There is a way around it! There is a tiny little link at the bottom of the page which says open in Safari- it will open the picture up in Safari and you can choose to download it as a png document if the clip art is available in that format. You can then go through the same process with iPhoto.

iFontmaker

Want to make your own fonts, but don't have 100's of dollars to buy a font maker? Well as always there's an app for that! I found this nice app to make fonts. It's very inexpensive, less than 10 bucks. You can make fonts and publish them, or leave them unpublished and put them on Teachers Pay Teachers. The steps are very easy to use. I was able to navigate through the app in about 15 minutes and begin my font-making adventure!

ArtStudio

Want to draw your own clip art? I find it nearly impossible to do it in on my Macbook, unless I purchase an additional drawing mechanism. However, the iPad is very easy to use for this purpose. Just purchase a stylus (less than 10 bucks at walgreens) and this app for 4.99 and you're ready to go. You can save your images as png or jpegs. The app is very easy to use and if you have questions, their customer service is great. Just send them a concern or suggestion, and they respond.