A Tip
There are many ways to enhance Social Studies lessons and activities using Apple Tools. You’ll find lots of good tips and resources here in the Social Studies area of the Apple Education Community. Sometimes teachers post social studies ideas to the broader area of Teaching and Learning rather than under the sub category of Social Studies. So if you mostly visit just the social studies area in the Forum, you might not discover them. Using “social studies”, “history” or “geography” in the Community search feature (upper right) will help to catch all of them.
Check these out
For example here are two recent posts that are pretty amazing that were posted in Teaching and Learning:
Jennifer Orton’s Learning Guide with Notes walks us through an engaging way to use Notes to guide students through a lesson on the American Revolution (also applicable to all disciplines).
Burgess Jeffries shares a very cool example of Integrating Coding into Social Studies using maps and the Lewis & Clark expedition.
And a Request…
I’m creating simple Keynote animations for a Power Session at the National Council for Social Studies in Washington DC, December 2025. The title is Design for Democracy: Incorporating Student Voice by Animating Primary Sources. As I build out these Keynote animations, I’ll post here in in the Community Social Studies area to hopefully garner some feedback and ideas. I’ll be animating Library of Congress primary source historic posters using Keynote with a theme that focuses on Democracy.
This historic World War I (circa 1918) primary source poster was created to encourage Americans to drop off books to their local libraries as donations to the soldiers in camp. This was fun and easy to animate using Keynote Edit Mask, change background, and Animate, “Build in” using “Wipe”.
Here is the link to the actual poster in the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/94514639/
More to come…
Attach up to 5 files which will be available for other members to download.