iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

US 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.

5 Good iPad Apps for Teachers and Students of U.S. History

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As someone who used to teach U.S. History I still get excited when I see iPad apps made specifically for the purpose of helping students understand significant events in U.S. History. The following apps are iPad apps that I’ve enjoyed using over the last year.

Screen Shot 2013-10-15 at 11.30.15 PMKIDS DISCOVER currently offers fourteen iPad apps for students. The latest KIDS DISCOVER app is about the U.S. Civil War. The content of the app is far superior to the Civil War section of any middle school or elementary school social studies textbooks that I’ve seen. In the app students can read text, listen to audio of things like the Gettysburg Address, and manipulate 3-D objects. The app also includes videos, cartoons, and plenty of historical imagery. Students can tap the images to learn more about the people and places pictured. After working through all of the chapters of the app students can test their knowledge with review quizzes and puzzles.

 

infinity_ring Infinity Ring is a series of three free iPad apps from Scholastic. The app that I tried was Infinity Ring: Revenge of the Red Coats in which students travel back in time to the War of 1812. In the game students explore Washington D.C. and the White House. The primary mission that students have to complete is to convince Dolley Madison to leave the White House before it is burned. In addition to completing the primary mission of getting Dolley Madison out of the White House there are other mini challenges that get students to think about the War of 1812.

 

 

think_fast Think Fast About the Past is a free iPad game about U.S. history. This free iPad app is the companion to the Mission U.S. website that offers interactive journeys through U.S. history.Think Fast About the Past contains two “missions” for students to complete. The first mission is set in Boston in 1770. The mission is to find the mission dog named thimble before time expires. To find Thimble students have to correctly answer a series of questions about political and social topics of the 1770’s and 1780’s. For example, one question asks students how women supported the American Revolution. The second mission in Think Fast About the Past is set in Kentucky in 1850. In this mission students have to answer a series of questions about slavery, abolition, and the Civil War. The object is to answer all of the questions correctly in five minutes or less.

Screen Shot 2014-02-24 at 3.22.34 PM The National Archives Experience’s Docs Teach interactive tools center and is my favorite teaching tool from the National Archives. The free Docs Teach iPad app allows your students to access and complete a wide range of primary source-based U.S. History lessons. When your students open the app they have an option to browse for a lesson according to time frame and topic or they can enter a class code to complete an activity that you have created specifically for them. To create a Docs Teach activity specifically for your students you will have to create an account on the website. Docs Teach offers seven free tools that teachers can use to create interactive learning activities based on primary source documents and images. The seven tools are Finding a Sequence, Focusing on Details, Making Connections, Mapping History, Seeing the Big Picture, Weighing the Evidence, and Interpreting Data. To get a sense of how each of these activities works you can view existing activities made and shared here by other teachers.

Screen Shot 2014-02-24 at 2.49.48 PM The Cuban Missile Crisis is one of the landmark events discussed in nearly every course covering the Cold War. To The Brink is an excellent free iPad app through which students can learn about the causes of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy administration’s handling of the crisis. The app uses archival images, videos, documents, and audio recordings to tell the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The app is arranged as a series of pages for students to flip through. On each page there are icons that students can tap to get more information in the forms of documents, images, and videos.