Social Studies

For an online discussion forum where students can either introduce a discussion, enhance one with sources, or continue one that was started within the classroom, it would be best to use a forum like a Wiki platform. Below are some sites that can be used as an educator with your students, which will allow you to make it private where only the students have access.

Wikispaces
www.wikispaces.com

PBworks
educators.pbworks.com

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Did you ever want to show the students the mistakes that keep occurring within their writing as a class? Do you want to show them the variety of words, or lack of, that are a part of their writing? There is an easy and very visual way to do this called Word Clouds. You can enter an entire class of papers by copying and pasting using digital copies of student papers before they turn in their finals.      www.wordle.net

Once you have entered the papers, the words that are not common like "the" or "it" can be removed and the rest of the vocabulary used by a class put together. The bigger the word, the more often it was used. Above is a demonstration of a paper that was entered into Wordle and you can see the correlation to how often a word is used. The same will show up with common mistakes in spelling.

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When discussing the Geography or Environment of the past and present of the Earth, EarthViewer can give you and your students a screen shot of information based on the time period. If you want to have students do a report where they discuss the atmosphere of the Earth at a specific time, then the information can be found on this free app.

There is also a teachers section located on the bottom that will help with the navigation of this app. This would also be a great way to have a joined project between Social Studies and Science.

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Creating a book is a great exercise to get the mind flowing when it comes to students. They like to be able to come up with a story that intrigues those that read it. How great would it be to actually develop a book and see it on a virtual bookshelf? There are apps that allow the students to write text, attach visuals, and narrate their book with ease. It is simple and yet it will give students the chance to write within their own genre of technology as a digital native.

BookCreator is an example of one of the applications found to easily help students create a book, but it costs $4.99. While Little Story Maker and Bindle are free and will allow the students to create and share just like BookCreator.

Once done, you and the students within the classroom can hold discussions on Subtext about the books that were created by individuals within the classroom. Subtext doesn't only allow you to discuss the books developed within the classroom, but if there are books downloaded as a classroom set you can add questions and assignments to the end of each chapter while requiring them to comment as they read the book. This program is free to everyone and can be used on the iPads.