Thing 18: Education

Thing 18 is educational apps, and I downloaded a lot of them. I'll do brief reviews of each. All in all, mobile devices seem to make learning a lot more interesting and fun.

The 3D Brain app is cool, and would be helpful for those studying the brain for a class or needing a refresher. My sister is a speech-language pathologist, so I searched 'auditory' in the search box and came up with the image of the portion of the brain that controls our auditory perceptions. Pretty cool stuff.

Next, I played around with the Bill Nye app. I grew up watching the Science Guy, so I was hesitant about this app, but found it fun and was pleasantly surprised. I especially liked that it featured actual science experiments.

Then, I re-launched DuoLingo, which I've been using since December to refresh my French before a summer trip to Paris, and found some nice recent updates. I'd fallen behind on practicing, but I jumped right back into it. I really like this app for language acquisition and reinforcement.

I played around with the LittleLearners app, but it seems like it might be better if I were familiar with the books, or be about 1-3 years old. I liked that some of the language was also represented in text, so it gives kids some print experience.

I watched author Elizabeth Gilbert's newest TED Talk with that app, and liked that it was searchable very easily.

The Wikipedia app also made using that site a bit easier. I often 'go down a rabbit hole' on Wikipedia when I start following interesting links, and this app would make doing that much easier than the browser on my phone.

 

And last, the National Archives Document of the Day app is a cool way to highlight all the various and items in the archives, and learn something new about history every day.