National Archives- Today's Document

Get it here.
Cost: Free
UDL Guideline 7.1- Optimize individual choice and autonomy
National Archives- Today's Document app is a great way to optimized and ensure engagement by providing learners choices and autonomy in the way they learn a concept. The app allows the student to explore history by looking and investigating primary documents. The student has to make a choice after opening the app to either look at yesterday's document, today's document, tomorrow's document, select a date, or surprise me (random selection). This allows each student to make a choice for an event that will be interesting to them to investigate for a few moments. The purpose of the app is to get the viewers interested in learning about history, not necessarily a particular event or time period.  

General Critique
Each day you’ll get a message letting you know that today’s document is available. Each document is one page. If you want to read more about the document you can tap the at the top of the screen.  It offers you to view the document on archives.gov or read more about it. Tapping the share icon at the top of the screen allows you to email a link to the document or share it on Twitter or Facebook. You can also tap the star icon and save it as a favorite. Tapping the calendar icon allows you to see yesterday’s document, today’s document, tomorrow’s document, select a date or allow the app to surprise you. You can also swipe left to right and see earlier documents or return to the current date.