App 1: TED Talks
This week the first app I looked at was TED Talks. It's very similar to iTunes U in that it has videos that talk about a variety of different topics. In the app I found 4 videos that would be useful in different units of my curriculum. The first was by David Bismark and it talked about how to avoid fraud in e-voting systems. This particular video would be great to use in a government lesson about how the voting system works and how it has evolved over the years.
The second video is about the transformation of New York city from the woodland it started out as, to the metropolis that it is today. This would be a perfect video to incorporate into a lesson on the founding of the colonies and the growth of Colonial America.
The third video is about the Lakota people and their treatment by the government in modern times and how that treatment was caused by government actions. I would work this video into a unit on Native Americans and the push for them to move onto reservations by the US government and the repercussions that those actions had on the Native Americans.
The final video was about mania that surrounded the launch of Sputnik. When talking about the Cold War this video would really capture the urgency that surrounded the Space Race. Since the Space Race was an integral part of the Cold War this video would be perfect to capture the anxiety and emotion of this era.
The TED app for iPad is really easy to use. You are able to AirPlay the videos to your television using an AppleTV, which allows multiple people to view the video at once. You can also save the video so you can view it when you don't have internet connection. The search function and tag section are easy to use since the tags are sorted alphabetically.
I'll definitely be using the TED Talks app in my classroom to introduce specific topics like the Sputnik into general units like the Cold War.