DocsTeach vs Stele

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.

Stele is a history learning app for Android and the web, with interactive maps, animated tours, lessons, timelines and quizzes. Map tours show historical events unfolding as borders, cities and campaigns change. Lessons provide a brief summary alongside deeper context; Battle mode narrates armies moving along real routes. Voices presents social-media-style posts attributed to people from the past, but its dialogue is creatively imagined, not historical quotation, and should not be cited as such. Listed timeline subjects include Rome, Ancient Greece, the Middle Ages, American history, World War I and World War II. Guided study paths, quizzes and knowledge checks offer ways to explore and review topics. The Rise and Fall of Rome timeline is free to explore. Stele says there are no subscriptions or recurring charges; other timelines require a single purchase, and new timelines may be optional one-time add-ons. Google Play reports no data collected and none shared with third parties.