Holiday Gift Guide: iPad Apps for Students

Welcome to TUAW's 2011 Holiday Gift Guide! We're here to help you choose the best gifts this holiday season, and once you've received your gifts we'll tell you what apps and accessories we think are best for your new Apple gear. Stay tuned every weekday from now until the end of the year for our picks and helpful guides and check our Gift Guide hub to see our guides as they become available. For even more holiday fun, check out sister site Engadget's gift guide.

If there's a student with an iPad on your gift list, you can save yourself the trouble of mall shopping by turning to the iOS App Store for the perfect gift. You can either gift an app directly or give your scholar an iTunes gift card and a list of recommended apps to install. To help you in the app department, we've spent some time finding titles suitable for the high school and college student in your life (all prices are USD).

Evernote (Free)

Evernote is an excellent note-taking app that stores all your notes in the cloud, so you can access them from your iPhone or desktop. You can create normal text notes and audio notes. You can also search and modify existing notes. It's available for free and is a must-have for anyone taking notes.

Safari To Go (Free; Service requires a subscription)

Safari Bookshelf is a technical resource that lets gives you access to books and videos about technology and digital media. Computer science students can read books, print portions of books and save books for offline reading. The service requires a monthly fee, but iPad app is free.

Documents to Go Premium ($16.99)

Documents to Go is a powerful document editor for the iPad. It lets you create and edit Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents. You can also view iWork, PDF, and text files. When you are done editing, you can send the files to online storage sites like Google Docs, Dropbox, box.net and SugarSync.

iHomework ($1.99)

iHomework is an app to help you manage your course workload. It'll keep track of your assignments and set reminders for when they are due. You can also log all your grades so you know how well you are doing in a class. There's even a section for course information that lets you store the course location, time and the professor's contact information.

Papers ($14.99)

Papers is a research tool that'll let you find and read academic journals. The app will search several public repositories including JSTOR, Pubmed and Google Scholar. You can also import PDF journal articles from journal sources and view them in the app. Once a file is in your library, you can highlight text and add notes.

AudioNote - Notepad and Voice Recorder ($4.99)

AudioNote is an audio recorder that lets you record a lecture so you can sleep take excellent study notes. The notes are stored and synced with the audio stream so you review a lecture point-by-point. It's an excellent tool for students who want a digital copy of a lecture, so they can review points they may have missed.

Genius Scan ($0.99)

Genius Scan is a basic scanning app that lets you scan a document to jpg or PDF. The file can be emailed or uploaded to Dropbox, Evernote and Google Docs. It costs 99-cents and brings the functionality of a copier to your iPad. There's also a free version that doesn't support documents uploads and contains ads.

Converter for iPad ($0.99)

Converter for iPad lets you convert measurements and currency from one unit to another. The app will change length, weight, temperature, speed, data, volume area, and time. It also converts 63 currencies using the daily exchange rate.

Teleprompt + ($14.99)

Teleprompt + lets you turn your iPad into a teleprompt device, which can be used during your next big presentation. It's a flexible app that can be used alone or with an external projector. You can also record the audio and video of your speech, so you can practice it before the big day. Teleprompt + supports most Bluetooth keyboards, which makes it easy to type in text of a speech. When done, the completed teleprompt documents can be uploaded to Dropbox or Google Docs.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary - Premium ($2.99)

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary app is a must-have for students who spend a fair amount of time writing essays. It contains definitions, synonyms, antonyms and a thesaurus. The app also has a voice search feature so you find a word without knowing how to spell it. This version is a premium version with additional words and no advertising. A free version with ads is also available.

EMD PTE (Free)

EMD PTE is a periodic table app for science students. It lists all the elements, their properties and the history of their discovery. All this information is stored locally so you don't need an Internet connection to look up information on Iron or Molybdenum. It's available in multiple languages and includes additional utilities like a molar mass calculator and tv-out support.

Graphing Calculator+ ($2.99)

Graphing Calculator+ is a graphing, handwriting and scientific calculator for the iPad. It lets you plot up to six equations at a time

Keynote ($9.99)

Keynote is perfect for creating and editing presentations on the iPad. The iPad app has 12 different themes and 20 slide transitions. There's an animation editor so you can control the movement of items on your slide. You can also store presentations in iCloud and edit them on other devices. If you're a Mac user, it's worth the $10 to grab the mobile version of the Keynote app.

iThoughtsHD ($9.99)

iThoughtsHD is a mind mapping application to help you organize your thoughts. It's great for planning large written essays and designing scientific experiments. You can import mind maps from a variety of desktop applications and export your mind map to PDF and PNG files. You can also store your creations in the cloud using Dropbox, Box.net, MobileMe or WebDAV-based services.

Flashcards* (Free, $2.99 to remove ads)

Flashcards* is a flashcard app with sets for almost every subject. The app ties into the Quizlet service which lets you create flashcard sets on the desktop and share them with other devices. You can also send your sets to Dropbox and share them others.