How Can Teachers Use It?
World Book -- This Day in History is a free resource that can give teachers ideas for trivia to introduce to kids or serve as connections to what students are studying. The snippets, without any historical context, aren't meaty enough to serve as instructional. The app could be used as an idea-generating tool when students are looking for historical research topics.
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What's It Like?
The calendar opens to the current date, showing several events from that date in history, with a picture accompanying each. Clicking links within an event's description gives a brief encyclopedia entry on the topic, plus Amazon.com links to related books. Kids can easily scroll through the calendar to find other dates and then return to the current date by clicking a button at the top of the page. Events have an icon next to them -- a molecule for scientists, a quill and ink for authors, and guns for military events, for example -- but categories aren't explained. Neither icons nor images are clickable.
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Is It Good For Learning?
World Book -- This Day in History is a simple, but solid, app, all the better for being free. The descriptions are encyclopedic -- short enough to be accessible, but without much depth or context. Kids will enjoy seeing what happened around the world on a particular date -- their birthdays, for example The historical events represet a broad range of topics and countries; the focus is on the United States, but students will still get exposure to many different cultures. It would be great to be able to search or browse events by category, rather than just looking up days with no historical context or timeline.
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In portrait mode, today's events fill up the screen.
In landscape view, the calendar is visible for easy browsing.
Links to related materials are included with some entries.
Brief descriptions of events are easy to read.
