iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

social studies

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.

Try Getty Images Stream to Spark Students’ Interest in Current Events

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Screen Shot 2014-10-02 at 11.30.16 PM Over the years I frequently used resources like the BBC’s Week In Pictures and Ten by Ten to give students visual prompts about current events. I found that the pictures often sparked more questions from students than just giving them a news article to read. The Getty Images Stream iPad app could be used for the same purpose.

Getty Images Stream features photographs from Getty photographers all over the world. Select a category to flip through a set of related images. You can also enter a search term to find images. Long press on any of the images to bring up some brief information about the image. You can also save images into a collection of your own in the app.

Drawp for School – A Good App for Students to Create and Share Drawings

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Screen Shot 2014-09-29 at 9.38.51 AM Last year I reviewed Drawp. Drawp is an excellent app for students to use to create and send digital artwork to family members. Drawp for School offers the same great features as Drawp while incorporating features for classroom use.

Drawp for School allows students  to create drawings, take pictures, and create audio recordings. Students can combine those elements into one final product that they share with their teachers and classmates. Teachers can use the app to create multiple class rosters. From their class rosters teachers can see all of the work that their students have shared with them. Teachers are also able to manage students’ passwords from their class rosters.

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Teachers could have students use Drawp for School to complete assignments in which they are asked to diagram concepts, highlight features on a map, or explain how to solve a mathematics problem.

Experience America HD Showcases Common Tourist Attractions

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Screen Shot 2014-07-07 at 8.36.30 PMExperience America HD Magazine is a free iPad app produced by USA Today. The app features popular tourist attractions around the United States. The app is populated with lots of “top ten places to see for X” articles which are nice even though they’re not terribly informative. The best aspect of the app is the National Parks section that contains a mix of text and image essays about U.S. National Parks. A small collection of videos about travel in the United States is also found in Experience America HD Magazine.

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Experience America HD Magazine could be a good app to have students use as part of a geography lesson about the United States. For example, one of the projects that one of my geography classes did was create a plan for traveling across the United States and stopping to see landmarks that represented human geography and physical geography in each state.