I’m using our IPads in all the different subjects I teach.  I’ve used a lot of the apps that have been mentioned in previous blog posts and my favorite so far is a free app called Socrative.  We have individual books about different historical figures or events in our new Social Studies series.  I’ve been using the books and writing two sets of questions about each book.  We don’t have much time for Social Studies so we try incorporate it in our ELA rotations.  One set of questions I have titled “Note-Taker” and the students read the book and fill in the Note-Taker worksheet/questions as they read.  They really don’t know how to take notes yet and this has helped them a lot.  I like writing the questions myself because I try to use information from a lot of different text features and this a great way for them to become more familiar with reading all the different text features in a story.  This counts as one item on their menu board.  I make up a separate set of questions and I put those questions on a Socrative quiz.  You have a choice of what kind of question you’d like to write: multiple choice, true/false, or short answer, and these different types of questions can all be mixed within one test.  After you make and save the test, it will give you an SOC number, I send that number to my teammates and other teachers in Wylie who use it and they download that specific test and save it to their Socrative account.  The kids go to the Socrative app, sign up for the test you want them to take (it will ask for their name) and their results will go to your Socrative account.  (Make sure you look under scores and not progress)  I started out giving them the page number where they could find the answer since this was so new to them, and now I no longer do this, they just have to read the book and find the answers.  The books that we have read from the Social Studies series so far are written anywhere from a 2.5-3.0 AR reading level.  The books that are about individuals have been AR testers so they can earn AR points as well.  Some of our lower level readers are able to listen to the book if you have a computer available to them, but we haven’t figured out how to make that available on the IPad. (They can read it on the IPad, there’s just not a sound file to go with it for the IPad)  It would be ideal if we could load the Social Studies series that comes on a thumb drive on every computer in the second computer lab but Misty said that teachers don’t have the ability to do that.  I asked our Social Studies admin person if they would give Misty permission to load it on every computer in the lab and she is checking into it.  We have been counting the Socrative as a Social Studies grade and the Note-Taker as an ELA grade.  I’ve used Socrative for other things as well, the kids seem to enjoy it and if you want them to redo it, you are able to mix the questions around and let them retake it.  I started using it here, and now Tibbals is using it along with us.  It’s a great way to incorporate Social Studies and Science into ELA.