Last summer, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their Best Apps for Teaching and Learning 2017. The apps encourage qualities such as creativity and collaboration, and encourage discovery and curiosity.

The app The New Immigrants: NYC 1880-1924 “explores the immigrant experience through a carefully curated collection of over 100 artifacts that includes photos, documents, newspaper articles, political cartoons, oral histories, videos and much more. This is a comprehensive collection of primary and secondary sources and images related to the second wave of U.S. immigration. The “Teaching Immigration” section provides sample lesson plans, teaching strategies to develop historical thinking skills, and document based performance tasks.”

Level: Elementary +
Platform: iOS
Cost: FREE

School Library Journal has this detailed review of the app, or check out this review from a social studies teacher who has used the app in the classroom.

Last summer, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their Best Apps for Teaching and Learning 2017. The apps encourage qualities such as creativity and collaboration, and encourage discovery and curiosity.

Level: All
Platform: iOS | Android
Cost: FREE

The app CoSpaces lets students create their own virtual reality worlds! Students can choose from a “collection of characters and objects which can be adapted and animated.” Once their world is created, they can view it with a mobile device and headset. Some quick tips include importing your own 360 photos to make custom stages for your VR world, or have more advanced users incorporate Blockly code to bring their world to life.

This review from EdShelf breaks down CoSpaces and includes some highlights of the app. Common Sense Education has this article about the app which features a Pro Con list as well as classroom activity ideas.

Watch this quick video for a glimpse into the world of CoSpaces:

Last summer, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their Best Apps for Teaching and Learning 2017. The apps encourage qualities such as creativity and collaboration, and encourage discovery and curiosity.

The app MeisterTask is a way to manage tasks and projects in a visual way that allows easy collaboration. Students and teachers can make project boards for group tasks, where the group members can see tasks in progress and also ones that have been finished. Members of the group are able to assign tasks, get notifications when tasks are finished or edited, and use widgets to see active tasks. Plus, if your school uses Chromebooks, you can use the Chrome extension to access your dashboard. In addition, “if a school has purchased the mind mapping tool MindMeister, maps can be exported directly into MeisterTask to create a connected project with task synchronization. MeisterTask is an intuitive tool to help streamline collaborative projects, keeping groups organized and on task.”

Level: Middle School +
Platform: iOS and Android
Cost: FREE

Looking for reviews of this app? Finances Online has this favorable review, and this post from GetApp includes testimonials from real-life users.  And if you are interested in using MindMeister in your classroom, here’s an article from the Focus blog that has some useful suggestions!

Watch this video to learn how to use MindMeister and MeisterTask!