Mock-up Interactive Web and Mobile Apps for Free!!

Students love websites and apps, and there are lots of great ways that you can incorporate having students create their own app into a lesson.  Of course, it's unlikely that your students will be all be skilled in Xcode or jQuery, but now with InVision students can simulate a functional App simply and collaboratively!

 Quick Ideas:

• Social Studies: Create an interactive App for a Battlefield 
• Science: Create an Interactive Field Guide App for your Local Wetlands 
• Art: Create a Social App for People to Share and Comment on their Favorite Artwork
• Business:  Competition to build the next "it" app in Social Networking

All of these are fun and engaging ways to get students to research and provide for a better way to assess learning than a multiple choice exam. Students start by creating the screens for their App in something like PowerPoint, Word, Pages, or Keynote. They then save each screen as an individual PDF. InVision will give you guidelines for screen sizes based on iPhone, iPad, or Android device.

Using InVision, students can upload all of their screens and then link them using "hot spots." Once they are done linking the screens together with the right series of taps, swipes, and pull downs, they can send their teacher a URL with their interactive App.  You can see an example by clicking here.

More than one student can collaborate on a project at the same time, this way students in a group can be responsible for creating their own screens and then linking them in the master project.  InVision tracks changes so you can see which student worked on what. They can even share the project with you to mark-up for feedback.  InVision is free for only one project at a time, but students can print PDF copies of their projects if they want to save them.

If you or your students use InVision I'd love to see examples of their work, please post the link in the comments below.