DocsTeach vs Paladin: Learn History

DocsTeach is a free interactive teaching website built around primary sources in the National Archives holdings. Its collection includes thousands of letters, photographs, speeches, posters, maps, and videos. Teachers can create activities by selecting a tool and sources, then customizing instructions. Activity formats include document analysis, discussion, compare and contrast, zoom and crop, sequencing, mapping, and interpreting data. Students can submit and save responses for a teacher to view in My Students’ Responses, or send responses by email. Teachers can share activities to Google Classroom, where students can turn in their work through its button. For lessons using other materials, teachers can upload JPG, PNG, GIF, or JPEG documents and images up to 8 MB per file. The redesigned site supports exploring and creating activities on computers and tablets, and students can turn in work through the DocsTeach App for iPad. A free account costs nothing and allows users to create, save, and share activities and primary sources, and access hundreds more educator activities. Creating an account requires a name, email address, and password.

Paladin: Learn History presents history through short stories designed for about five minutes of learning each day. Interactive stories and epic battles are paired with quizzes and characters users can unlock, and the site says historians fact-check stories about real events. Users can browse the material chronologically, while quizzes and review provide ways to revisit lessons. The app records lesson consumption, quiz results, completed learning paths and milestones to support progress across devices. Paladin offers a free version and a paid Pro subscription. Listed Pro choices are $12.99 a month, $24.99 months, or $29.99 a year. Monthly and yearly subscriptions renew automatically; cancelling ends auto-renewal at the end of the current cycle. Subscription management is available in the web app or mobile app, depending on where the subscription began. Paladin is listed for Android, iOS, macOS and web, and is headquartered in Bucharest, Romania. Its license is limited to personal, non-commercial, educational use. The company says data is encrypted in transit and at rest and that it does not sell personal data.