Good sources for finding educational iphone / iPad apps

The problem of finding good educational apps is a subset of searching Apple apps in general.  The default option is to go through the Apple interface on iTunes or on the device itself which presents you with an ever longer list of badly differentiated items.

Make sense of that!

not as useful as it seems

So what to do? Listing by most popular, most highly rated is good for a quick overview but offers no drill down or specialisation.

3rd party sites

Apple onlys lists apps by how their creators tag them which can be alright but is often either very broad, nearly useless and / or wishfully misrepresentative.

iphoneapplicationlist.com - 'education' search

Third party websites allow users to carry out a full search without needing an iTunes account. They may be easier to use and usually offer access to reviews and ratings so are definitely worth a look. However they still rely on the iTunes database and original app tagging to return results which is limiting.

An app to help you find apps

Chomp are going a bit further. Chomp is an app to help you find apps, though they also have a web interface – they aim to bring up a list of relevant items even if none were originally tagged with that keyword using an Amazon-type algorithim. Might be worth a look.  On the face of it, a potential downside is that their social business model may be in conflict with useful information as the site scales: they encourage users to review items with a binary love it / hate it and .. wait for it … will of course be sending out the joyous news of your review to anyone following you.

Any other recommendations?

Maybe not such a long way from here to there

It would be well to remember that these are very early days in the web app universe – a sort of reverse takeover of the web by apps. Search mechanisms will remain stone age in terms of the most basic subject specialist meta data for a while yet. That said, the enthusiasm with which Higher Education in the UK and elsewhere is is going mobile, the situation will improve. Not just in apps but across all platforms, be that on  iTunesU, YouTube or other respositaries of  learning content.