iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

history

Ripped Apart – An iPad App About the Civil War

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ripped apart Ripped Apart is a free iPad app from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. The app is a game in which students play the role of a Smithsonian intern tasked with examining documents and photographs in order to determine where they came from and what they say about the Civil War. Through the game students will learn learn about significant people in the Antebellum and Civil War eras. Students will learn about leading abolitionists, secessionists, and officers on both sides of the Civil War. As they move through the game students will add notes in the app. Those notes should help them solve the mysteries in the game.

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I installed Ripped Apart this evening and played it for a while. There are a couple of things that you should note about the app before using it with your students. First, the app does not have a log-in so if your students are sharing iPads they will have to complete the activity before passing off the iPad to another student. Second, students need to complete an activity before moving onto the next one in the app. In other words, they cannot skip around in the app. Finally, an online supplement to the app is available on the Smithsonian website.

JFK Challenge Teaches Students About the Space Race and Peace Corps

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jfk JFK Challenge is a new iPad app designed to help elementary and middle school students learn about the Apollo missions and the Peace Corps. The free app features a series of games for learning about each program. I played the first couple of games about the Peace Corps and the first couple of games about the Apollo missions. The games are nice, but I think that the real value of the app is found in the introductory materials that appear before the games.

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To get the full value out of the JFK Challenge students should not skip the introduction to the app or the introductory materials that appear before the games. The introductory text, images, and audio provide the historical context and significance of each program.

To The Brink is a related app that teaches students about President Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Congressional Moments for iPad – Learn to Identify Primary Sources

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Screen Shot 2014-10-27 at 9.50.00 AM Congressional Moments is a free iPad app that features key Congressional activities that still affect our lives today. The app includes videos about six important areas. Those areas are the National Parks Service, Civil Rights, Child Labor, the Marshall Plan, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The videos are a nice part of the app, but my favorite aspects of the app are the sections designed to help students learn to distinguish the difference between primary and secondary sources.

Three sections of the Congressional Moments iPad app are designed to teach students the differences between primary and secondary sources and their roles in research. The “explore primary sources” section shows students a resource and asks them to choose if that source is a primary source or not. Students receive instant feedback with explanations of the correct answers. In “hear from the experts” students can watch a series of videos featuring two scholars explaining how to identify and use primary sources in research. The primary sources gallery in Congressional Moments features photos, drawing, letters, and maps arranged according to the themes included in the videos at the beginning of the app.

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The “think about it” section of the Congressional Moments iPad app asks students to use the information they read and watched in the previous parts of the app. The “think about it” section contains questions that teachers can use as the basis for lessons on the Congressional activities featured throughout the app.

To Be Free – A Smithsonian App About the Emancipation Proclamation

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Screen Shot 2014-10-03 at 10.04.07 AM The Smithsonian offers many excellent educational iPad apps. To Be Free is one of the free Smithsonian iPad apps that I recently downloaded. To Be Free features the stories of former slaves and others affected by the Emancipation Proclamation. You can scroll through slideshows and read personal accounts from people of all ages, status, and location in the United States at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation.

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The “make a connection” section of the app allows you to filter stories according to age, race, and gender. The “make a connection” section could be useful in helping students understand how people similar to them were affected by the Emancipation Proclamation. The Smithsonian offers this PDF of suggested lesson activities based on the app.

84 iPad Apps to Share With K-12 Teachers and Students

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ipad-254337_640Each day this week I shared sets of 21 iPad apps for various grade levels. To wrap-up the week I have put all four of those sets in this post. Please feel free to make copies of these slidedecks and share them with your colleagues. To make copies click the gear icon at the bottom of the slides then open the editor and choose “make copy” from the file menu. (You will need to be signed into a Google Account to make the copy).