Disciplines in Education

Apps for the Disciplines Review

Middle School


Epic Citadel-

This app is amazing and as a literature major my mind was flooded with ideas on how to use this.  Creative writing is often an area that most people choose to avoid but from my personal experience this is an area that needs to be covered which will teach so many different skills.  Using this app you step into a medieval world filled with castles, shops, stables, fairs and so many other things.  This world is so detailed with the use of Unreal Engine.  You could have the students explore the world come up with characters, and place them into the roles of society in that time.  This would be a great tool to integrate basically all the subjects into one thing.  For creative writing purposes it may inspire stories from this time period.  We can show our students pictures till their eyes fall out but this interaction with an actually medieval world is amazing.

The Weather Channel-

I reviewed this app because I love meteorology.  This would be an awesome tool to show students how we get our weather and to introduce them to the types of weather across the globe.  This shows the students radar, and the different features a weather person uses to bring us the weather.  You could assign students different places on earth, or have them choose, and report on the weather there for the week.  Another feature worth noting is the videos.  This allows you too see videos of the different weather that they normally wouldn't encounter.  This app is really great and I will be using it in my future science classes.  

Doodle Buddy

Drawing is not my thing but with this app I truly feel like an artist, in the most basic sense of the word.  It has so many different features to allow you to create your own master piece.  Like I said before I was never really good a drawing or creating images when it came to art, but with this app I felt inspired.  This would be a create way for teachers to allow students to express their creative side in a easy, and nonmessy way.  Now the first thought that comes to mind is "Why pay more when we can just use paper and pencil?"  This app saves your work digitally so if you want to use it on almost anything online you can.  Also it allows you to share your work through many different programs, such as email and even share it on Facebook.  This would be a good way for students to explore their creative side and might even find out that they like art and they are good at it.  I definitely recommend this app.

Beatwave

This app is perfect for anyone, musically incline or not.  It is easy to pick up and fun to play with.  You just simply line up dots as the line goes over them and it plays the notes.  This would be a fun activity to do with the entire class.  Have each student or group of students have a certain sound and have the class to work together to create a song together.  This app teaches student timing, cooperation, and how to have fun, which is a very important lesson for people to learn at any age.  I feel like this would be something I could easily incorporate into my class for almost any subject.

History Tools

I am not a fan of social studies or history, but this app is really cool.   Say that you want to know what happened in history on your birthday, you can find out.  This app allows you to click on almost any date and find out what happened on that day throughout history.  This includes important events, holidays, deaths and birthdays.  It is interesting to see other things that we normally wouldn't learn in history.  The appeal to students would be to see what happened on their birthday throughout the years.  After that they would be free to roam on the app looking up other days.  This would be a great hook into different sections of history or a fun fact of the day.