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Starting in 1999, these links document the use of computers in the classroom (both informal and formal learning environments) and come from a range of sources and media

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Whatever model of Android or iOS tablet you have available, it's a hugely versatile tool when it comes to educating and entertaining children. Here are some of the best apps and features you can make use of in the classroom - some of which you have to pay for and others that are free.

1 Dive into 360-degree videos

This is the most basic form of virtual reality, a full sphere of video centred on the spectator who can view an environment in any direction. The content works with VR headsets but is also available through browsers and mobile devices. Launch a 360-degree video in the Facebook or YouTube apps and children can tilt it around to change the view as the clip plays (a simple search should turn up some 360-degree content that will be clearly labelled). It's a more interactive way of exploring everything from distant countries to underwater shipwrecks (check out Discovery's YouTube channel for some great educational content).

2 Get creative with photo taking

The Android and iOS camera apps are simple enough to use and can be deployed to record anything from a field trip diary to the results of a science experiment or a class art show. A number of additional apps let you stitch pictures together and add stickers on top; Pic Collage for Kids is one of the best but there are others out there, while PicLab lets children add filters, text and various other effects.

3 Make music - no experience required

Tablets are well-known as music-making devices, even among professionals, and there are a plethora of apps available that make good use of the tablet's extra screen space compared with a mobile phone screen. These range from apps that enable you to add effects to existing tracks to apps to help you compose something from scratch, note by note. GarageBand (iOS) and Music Studio (iOS, £10.99) and Caustic 3 (Android) are worth a look, while for younger children apps such as ABC Music (iOS, £2.29) and Animal Band (Android and iOS) can help nurture the musical creativity of your kids. There are plenty of more specialised music apps available, so you should be able to find something to suit your children's age and even particular topics or instruments.

4 Record radio shows and podcasts

Alternatively, you can make music (or indeed any kind of audio) and then use a tablet to record it. Again, there are a lot of apps available for the job, from the free and basic to the feature-packed and premium. Have a look at the retro-looking Voice Recorder Free (iOS), the rather spartan Smart Voice Recorder (Android) or the professional tool Cubasis (iOS, £39.99), for example. Tablets have basic recording apps as standard, but there are plenty of third-party alternatives available if you have the budget for them.

5 Make immersive and interactive notes

In iOS 9, Apple revamped the native Notes application to make it much more powerful than before. Along with extra formatting controls, individual notes can now incorporate web links, checklists, photos taken within the app, sketches and miniature maps, making the app perfect for a whole range of tasks. Children could use Notes to record what happens on a field trip, to research a particular event in history, or for any other purpose where different media needs to be mixed with text.

6 Do the maths with Angry Birds

One of the most successful mobile games of all time, Angry Birds or one of its sequels (iOS/Android, £0.79) can also be educational. For example, assign numbers to the different coloured birds (or the pigs) to give each level a score and test if kids can calculate the highest and lowest possible scores. Or take advantage of the game's realistic (if cartoonish) physics engine to predict what's going to happen with each strike - if a bird hits a structure at a certain angle where will it fall? Get the children to identify the optimum place to strike and then see if they're correct. You can get children to write stories about the game, design their own levels, and create related artwork as well.

7 Add augmented reality to the real world

The free Aurasma apps (Android/iOS) allows children (and adults) to overlay real-world objects with digital graphics, including posters and doorways. It might sound complicated, but it's easy to use. When viewed through Aurasma and a tablet's camera, targeted post-it notes and classroom displays can launch photos and videos or interactive graphs and charts.

8 Start up a class blog

Starting a blog through a browser app can be confusing and difficult - something such as Easy Blog Jr (iOS, £2.99) makes the process much more straightforward. Kids log in by tapping on their picture (so it's suitable for shared devices), and they can then combine text, video and images into a blog post that goes live with a couple of taps. It makes web publishing as simple as it should be. For older students, Blogsy (iOS, £3.99) is a more complicated alternative with a host of extra capabilities, while Google's own Blogger (Android/iOS, free - requires a Google account) is another option to consider. In each case there are controls that give you final approval over what's posted online.

9 Test your children against Siri and Google Now

When you buy a tablet you get Siri or Google Now included - the digital assistants that respond to your voice and can look up almost anything on the web. Whether you want to compile questions for a quiz or you'd prefer to test the knowledge of your class against these artificially intelligent apps, there are many ways to use them. For simple questions, have your pupils race to answer first; for more difficult ones, they can write down their answers in advance and see if they're right. Try "When was the battle of Trafalgar?", "How far is it to the moon?", "What's four times six?" or "What's the capital of France?" and you can see what they're capable of.

10 See the world

It's easier than ever to take a virtual tour of the world for whatever lesson or topic you want to link the idea with. Apple's Maps app (iOS) includes a detailed 3D-flyover for some major cities (the options appear automatically when available). Google Maps (Android/iOS) has added 3D buildings in some areas and includes street view too (press and hold on any road for a closer look). Google Earth (Android/iOS) lets your kids see the contours and landmarks of the planet and can even overlay nuggets of information thanks to Wikipedia.

11 Get someone else to read the story

If story time is a regular event there are various ways you can save your voice or just give the kids some variety. iBooks (iOS) has an extensive audiobook library but which is rather plain in appearance; on the other hand you can choose something aimed directly at children like Read Me Stories (Android/iOS, free), Farfaria Story Time Best Book Reader (Android/iOS, free) and The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore (iOS, £3.99). Some of these apps are more like interactive movies than ebooks - with animations and clips that children can respond to - though the costs can quickly add up if you're buying individual titles.

12 Study the night sky

A tablet makes a great stargazing tool if your children are studying the pattern of the cosmos, and with the right app you don't have to wait for the sun to go down - you can simply point the tablet up at the sky and it will show the constellations as you move it around. SkySafari 5 (iOS, from £0.79), Star Walk Kids (Android/iOS, £2.29), SkyView Free (Android/iOS) and GoSkyWatch Planetarium (iOS, £2.99) are among the best apps, though there are more. While most are premium priced, many also provide a basic free edition so you can try them out before buying. The apps can even be used in daylight, but are most effective when pupils can see the stars in the night sky as well as on their device display.

13 Tune into worldwide radio

There's almost no end to the number of hats a tablet can wear - jukebox, map, e-reader, television and, importantly, radio. Using an app such as TuneIn Radio (Android/iOS, free), one of the best radio apps available, kids can experience music and talk shows from all across the world in dozens of different languages, with more than 100,000 stations to choose from. If you're studying a foreign culture, it's one way of bringing a taste of it into the classroom.

14 Document learning progress

Seesaw (iOS/Android, free) is a relatively new app, but it's hit the ground running with a suite of excellent tools enabling students to keep a record of what they're learning (and parents can get involved as well). Photos, videos, drawings, text, web links, pdfs and material from other apps can all be incorporated, and teachers have the option to log into the journals (and approve work) from any device. A recent update added blogging capabilities to the app and, thanks to the intuitive accounts system, a whole class can alternately share one tablet device if necessary.

15 Set up a class webcam

If you can fix a tablet somewhere suitable and have a few pounds to spare then iCam (Android/iOS, from £3) does a great job of turning the device into a private webcam that you and the children can log into and view from any web browser. Perhaps you want to keep an eye on the class vegetable patch or some wildlife outside the window, or maybe there's another class somewhere else in the world that you have a special partnership with and would like to contact on a regular basis - there are all kinds of different ways to use the app.

16 Make your own movies

You probably know how to use a tablet's camera app to record a movie, but you might not realise just how versatile it is. The default iPad app includes a time-lapse mode for recording a scene over a long period of time and then shortening the results (scroll up in the mode list to find it). Other apps can lend a hand too: use Stop Motion Studio (Android/iOS, free) to build a movie from a series of pictures, Shadow Puppet Edu (iOS, free) to add voice narrations, music and text, or ChatterPix Kids (iOS) to turn inanimate objects and drawings into animated talking heads.

17 Produce your own comics and storybooks

The process of producing a comic (or storybook) develops writing, drawing and design skills all at the same time, and apps such as Book Creator (Android/iOS) and ComicBook! (iOS, £2.29) give kids everything they need to put together their own creations through a tablet. Whether you want your class to adapt existing images into something new or would prefer to allow the kids to start from scratch, there's a wealth of creative features available covering text, graphics and drawings, and you can easily export the results in physical or digital form for others to enjoy as well. You could get a class to write their own superhero story or fairy tale, or start a story which children can then finish off.

18 Create 3D digital models from photos

With the right software, a digital 3D-model can be created from a series of photos taken at different angles, which is exactly what 123D Catch (Android/iOS) from Autodesk does. It turns any photographed object into a model that children can then view from any angle inside an app, upload to the web for other people to look at or even turn into a physical object through a 3D printer. In a digital world that's becoming more and more about virtual reality and 3D space, it's a useful introduction into how these digital models are created and applied inside apps (and it's a lot of fun too).

19 Translate foreign words and phrases instantly

From the simplicity of the post-it note approach applied by FlashSticks (Android/iOS, free) to the full-scale language learning
experience offered by Duolingo (Android/iOS, free), there's no shortage of apps out there to help children get to grips with a foreign tongue. As far as classroom fun goes, Google Translate (Android/iOS, free) is worth trying out: there's a special camera mode that converts text into a specified language on the fly, so you can play around with signs, headlines, blocks of text and more while exploring the basics of a foreign language. Audio and text translation features are also included.

20 Learn the basics of programming

Is the next Mark Zuckerberg hiding in your class? Children are being encouraged to get coding earlier than ever, and Cargo-Bot (iOS, free) is one of the best ways of teaching them the basics while keeping them entertained - the music and visuals are all to the highest standard and the levels pack in plenty of replay value as well. If Cargo-Bot doesn't seem suitable then Hopscotch (iOS, free), Tynker (Android/iOS, free), Lightbot (Android/iOS, £2.29) and Move The Turtle (iOS, £2.99) are all excellent alternatives you might want to investigate.

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20 ways to use a tablet in the classroom

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Whatever model of Android or iOS tablet you have available, it's a hugely versatile tool when it comes to educating and entertaining children. Here are some of the best apps and features you can make use of in the classroom - some of which you have to pay for and others that are free.

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When I need to know something, I can find it out in five minutes," says a 12-year-old in Gateshead. The generation of children aged about 16 or younger have never known a world without the internet. My work over the past decade has shown what exciting things happen when we let these children take learning into their own hands.

In 2006, a few colleagues and I worked out a route out of New Delhi into the heart of rural north-eastern India, avoiding all major urban areas. Two colleagues then drove along this route. Whenever they encountered a primary school, they stopped, administered tests in English, maths and science to the children and conducted a brief interview with the teachers.

We then totalled the marks for each school and plotted the result against its distance from Delhi. The unmistakable downward trend was traced to the attitude and quality of teachers in remote areas.

There are, and always will be, even in the developed world, places where good teachers do not want to go. How will learners in such areas get an equal opportunity? These areas are not necessarily geographically remote. They may be remote in other ways, for instance, areas in big cities that are socio-economically remote, areas that are religiously or ethnically remote.

This is where computers come in. Laptops were created for rich company executives; Microsoft wrote PowerPoint for corporate presentations; LCD projectors were invented for corporate boardrooms. We teachers borrowed this technology, at atrocious prices. The salespeople found a new market and sold to the richest schools in the world. But the richest schools already had good teachers and, mostly, good students. They judged the corporate technology to be over-hyped and under-performing. Countless people have said that educational technology does not deliver. But it was being tried in the wrong place.

I decided to modify and develop technology and take it to some of the remotest locations I could find. Would it survive, and if it did, what would it do for education?

Ten years ago, aided by the industrialist Rajendra Pawar, we started to install computers into brick walls in public places in hundreds of villages and slums in India, Cambodia and Africa. The media called this the "hole-in-the-wall" project.

The computers were designed to be used by 6- to 15-year-old children, free of charge and free of any supervision. In the first five years of the experiment, we showed that groups of children can teach themselves to use a computer and the internet, irrespective of who or where they are; irrespective of what language they speak and of whether they go to school or not.

Ten years later, a girl in rural Maharashtra is studying aeronautical engineering following her encounter with the computer in the wall. A village boy who became a genetic engineer in one of India's premier laboratories found the subject by reading the New Scientist at his hole in the wall.

What else could children learn on their own, apart from the use of computers? In Hyderabad, groups of children showed significant improvements in English pronunciation, with just few hours of practice on their own. They used a computer and a speech-to-text program that had been trained in a native English accent.

In the tsunami-hit village of Kalikuppam in southern India, children with access to a hole-in-the-wall computer taught themselves basic biotechnology, reaching a test score of 30% in just two months. They had started with a score of zero. If Tamil-speaking children could teach themselves biotechnology in English, on their own, how far can we go? A 30% score may be impressive, but it's still not a pass. We decided to use a local woman, working for an NGO, to help us go further. She had no background in biotechnology, but she took on the role of an untrained friendly mediator to encourage the children, using their desire to impress each other and their adult friend. Two months on, the scores in Kalikuppam rose to over 50%, close to what is achieved by trained subject teachers in the posh private schools of Delhi.

I brought these results back to Britain. By chance, Vikas Swarup, whose book became the film Slumdog Millionaire, revealed that he had been inspired to write his story by the hole-in-the-wall experiments. Following that, in an Education Guardian article, I made an appeal to British grandparents to give an hour of their time to talk, using Skype, to children in the slums and villages of India. Within days, 200 volunteers, of all ages, many of them retired teachers, had come forward.

In the following months, 40 of these "eMediators" had over 200 hours of contact with children in India. They read them stories, played games with them, and chatted about their two countries. A child development expert, Suneeta Kulkarni, is measuring the effects of this on the children's English communication skills.

Two years ago, we decided to try the same approach in the UK and have been working with three schools in the north-east. In Gateshead, 10-year-olds working in groups were able to answer GCSE questions they would normally encounter six years later. I asked if they could have done this more quickly if they had not shared a computer but worked on their own. They said they could not have done it at all that way.

In another school, with the help of a young teacher, Emma Crawley, we are evolving a model that could have far-reaching implications. The children work in groups of four, each group with a computer connected to the internet. They are given selected GCSE questions to work on. They usually get the answers right. Two months later, they are tested again, this time, without a computer, and each student by themself - as in a normal exam. The children show near perfect recall of the answers. Is this learning? I think it is.

I now believe that groups of children, given the appropriate digital infrastructure, a safe and free environment, and a friendly but not knowledgeable mediator, can pass school-leaving exams on their own.

The new model is straightforward. We call it a Self-organised learning environment (Sole). It just means a "cybercafe" environment for children - light, comfortable, safe and inexpensive. Children work in self-organised groups of four or five. They have the freedom to work as they please, or not to work, if they so please. Order is maintained by the children themselves. Sessions should be timetabled, just as playtime is. Each session is driven by a question designed by teachers.

On a recent visit to Turin, I asked 10-year-olds, "Who was Pythagoras, and what did he do?" Twenty minutes later, every group had right-angled triangles up on screen. One group was beginning to examine the equation of squares - they were heading towards the theory of relativity. In a school in Gateshead, nine-year-olds tackle Sats questions with confidence and ease. Crawley says it's too good to be true, but it is true.

Now we need to build Soles in every primary school. Teachers need to be trained to design simple questions that will evoke curiosity and interest while gently nudging a group towards the curriculum. Then, they can sit back and admire as learning happens. The teachers have to learn to let go. In the language of physics: "Education is a process of self-organisation and learning is its emergent property." I continue to try to find the guiding principles of the "physics" of education, but the method is ready for use.

Sugata Mitra is professor of educational technology at Newcastle University. * sugata.mitra@newcastle.ac.uk
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Give them a laptop and a group of pupils will teach themselves

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When I need to know something, I can find it out in five minutes," says a 12-year-old in Gateshead. The generation of children aged about 16 or younger have never known a world without the internet. My work over the past decade has shown what exciting things happen when we let these children take learning into their own hands.

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Speaking at LIFT 2007, Sugata Mitra talks about his Hole in the Wall project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own -- and then taught other kids. He asks, what else can children teach themselves?

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Dr. Sugata Mitra, Chief Scientist at NIIT, is credited with the discovery of Hole-in-the-Wall. As early as 1982, he had been toying with the idea of unsupervised learning and computers. Finally, in 1999, he decided to test his ideas in the field.