Technology for the Social Studies Classroom

Technology and Apps for the Social Studies Classroom

Edweb.net

Professional Networking and "Webinars"

EdWeb is an online professional social and learning network made up of teachers, faculty, and administrators from grades Pre-K through 12.This site is a great source for teachers looking to improve instruction or create more engaging lessons. The network provides professional development through online seminars and give educators the opportunity to share ideas and collaborate on ideas.

Draggo

Digital Bookmarking

Draggo is a digital bookmarking application that helps educators to easily keep track of resources, ideas, and sources for students. With this app, teachers can store, categorize, and share websites with other people, including students. This app can come in handy during research based projects since teachers can create different categories for students who are researching different topics and easily keep the sources and projects organized.

Explee

Creative Sketchnoting

Explee is a video scribing tool that allows the user to "sketch note" with the ability to add images, text, video, and audio to a workspace. This app holds multiple meaningful uses to the classroom from being a more engaging, creative form of note-taking to being used in the planning, drafting, creating, and publishing of writing or research projects.

MackinVIA

Database of primary sources (and its free!)

MackinVIA is a free database of primary sources. By introducing this application to the classroom, students will have the ability to look at topics from several different perspectives using easily accessible sources. This app allows users to save books or excerpts they find useful and keep them organized with the "backpack" feature. This application can be used by educators to locate primary sources for use in lessons and inquiry activities, while students can use it for research projects and classroom activities.

BookFlix and True Flix

Promoting interest in non-fiction

These applications by Scholastic, are tools that can be used to promote text to text connections while promoting interest in non-fiction in students in the elementary classroom. The apps pair pieces of fiction with non-fiction so when a student finishes reading a story about a topic that interest them, an explanatory articles follows up for them to read. BookFlix can be used for lower elementary grade levels, while TrueFlix is useful for the upper elementary grades