ChatGPT by OpenAI is a conversational chatbot that can be an invaluable tool for history teachers.

Features: For one, ChatGPT can provide detailed explanations of historical events, figures, and concepts. Students can ask questions about specific historical periods or topics and receive instant responses. With GPT-4o, students can leverage its human-like speaking ability to discuss history or roleplay historical characters. ChatGPT can generate content summaries on historical topics, which can be useful for assignments or revision. ChatGPT can also explain difficult concepts (ex. socialism, interstate relationships, tax treaties) at the appropriate level. ChatGPT can also role-play and take the identity of a historical character, so students can ask questions and engage in conversation.

For teachers, ChatGPT can assist in creating lesson plans, quizzes, and other content. It can generate questions for classroom discussions or tests, suggest teaching strategies based on the latest pedagogical research, and provide information on historical events or figures to supplement teaching materials.

Tom’s Takes: ChatGPT is an extremely versatile platform for history and social studies teachers. Its powers lie in facilitating personalized instruction, inquiry-based learning, immersive experiences, and serving as a teaching assistant.

To leverage it effectively, teachers need to construct effective prompts. Instead, many teachers gravitate towards AI teaching assistants because they offer streamlined prompt generation of teaching and learning materials. Yet, ChatGPT is the more versatile product. If teachers prompt effectively, they can create dynamic, engaging learning experiences that foster critical thinking, historical empathy, and a stronger understanding of historical issues.

Price: The newest, fastest, and most advanced model is GPT-4o and is free to use, though some features are reserved for Plus users.

Hello History AI by Humy is an AI-driven app that enables students to have life-like conversations with AI versions of historical figures.

Features: Hello History is a fun and unique opportunity to talk to 400+ historical figures. Characters are grouped by historical category, such as “Middle Ages” or “Founding Fathers of USA”. Students can ask questions directly to these AI-powered characters, receiving responses that reflect the historical figure's known beliefs, speeches, and writings.

The interactive nature of Hello History can help students better understand history by engaging them in meaningful discussions. By incorporating conversations with historical figures into their lesson plans, teachers can provide students with a unique perspective on the past that goes beyond textbooks.

Hello History now enables you to change the reading level of the historical figure’s outputs! And you can choose the language you would like your students and the historical figure to chat with. Over 40 languages available.

Tom’s Take: Hello History is ideal for creating personalized learning experiences that place students at the center of historical inquiry. Students will likely enjoy conversing with historical figures, and it may prompt some creative lines of investigation on their part.

One of Hello History’s strengths is that it emphasizes historical accuracy and context, arguably more than ChatGPT or CharacterAI. As a result, it’s more conducive to structured lessons.

That said, it only facilitates text conversations, while ChatGPT and CharacterAI enable voice conversations.

I also find it expensive, Users must pay $5.99 a month for use of its GPT-4 language model, while OpenAI has made the more powerful GPT-4o model free to all.

Price: Hello History is free for up to 30 credits. Annual plan is $99 a year.

Google Arts & Culture AI is a platform that uses artificial intelligence to enhance our understanding of art and its cultural importance.

Features: Google Arts & Culture can help students explore and understand historical events, civilizations, and places by providing a vast amount of information and interactive experiences.

Here are three examples of its offerings:

1. The White House: Google Arts & Culture AI offers a virtual tour of the White House, one of the most famous American structures.

2. The Palace of Versailles: Google Arts & Culture offers a virtual tour of the former royal residence in France palace, allowing you to see its grand architecture and beautiful gardens.

3. The Colosseum: Google Arts & Culture AI allows you to take a virtual tour of the Colosseum, giving you a glimpse into the world of ancient Rome.

These examples illustrate how Google Arts & Culture AI can provide unique insights into history, making it more accessible and engaging for students.

Tom’s Take: Google Arts and Culture stands out for its visually stunning learning experiences that transport students to different eras and places around the globe. The images and panoramas are gorgeous and captivating. Google Arts and Culture’s vast collection of resources and AI-powered personalization features make it an ideal platform for nurturing historical curiosity, cultural understanding, and appreciation for the arts.

Price: Free

Diffit is an AI-powered tool that significantly assists teachers in crafting personalized learning materials around select texts, such as primary sources.

Features: Diffit is able to modify a reading, passage, or article to match any reading level, ensuring that every student can access content appropriate for their grade. Teachers can search for a topic, term, or question and then select an estimated reading level for the output.

The strength of Diffit lies in its capacity to produce “just right” resources — readings aligned with the curriculum, vocabulary, comprehension checks, and more. It can create worksheets and activities that align with the curriculum, along with summaries, key vocabulary words, multiple-choice questions, short answer questions, open-ended prompts, and it cites sources.

These resources can be edited and copied, saving teachers a considerable amount of time while also ensuring that all students can access and engage with the content at their own level.

Tom’s Takes: For history teachers, Diffit can be an invaluable tool for helping students understand primary source materials. It is an excellent and well-rounded AI tool to create immersive, student-centered learning experiences that foster historical understanding and reading and writing skills. Its adaptive scenarios make it an ideal tool for exploring the complexities of historical texts and issues. (Note: if a primary source text is in archaic form try The Historian’s Friend.)

Price: Limited free features, but teachers can get free access to premium features for 60 days. An individual teacher subscription costs $14.99/month.

Twee AI can enrich enrich teaching and learning in History classrooms. It empowers educators through the generation of dynamic lesson content.

Features: While Diffit is more about adjusting content complexity to match student abilities, Twee stresses engagement through interactive and multimedia-rich lessons.

Twee offers a versatile range of tools designed to facilitate the creation, analysis, and discussion of specific texts. Naturally, these can be historical texts.

Twee is adept at generating thought-provoking questions, tailored exercises, and quizzes centered on a given text. It also excels at crafting engaging lead-in activities to prepare students for text comprehension.

Furthermore, Twee boasts an array of vocabulary-enhancing resources, encompassing exercises like word-formation and word-definition matching.

Additionally, it can construct concise dialogues utilizing target vocabulary and identify collocations within a text based on provided vocabulary parameters.

Tom’s Take: Twee is a fantastic tool for History and Social Studies teachers seeking to create engaging, skill-building reading and writing experiences for their students.

User-friendly and featuring intuitive prompts and templates, Twee’s ability to generate customized content and immersive activities makes it a must-have resource for English language educators.

Price: Twee free account includes 20 runs/month for Text Tools and 10 runs/month for Media Tools. The Pro account offers unlimited runs and costs $19/month.

"The Historian's Friend" is a customized GPT (chatbot) to assist in in historical research.

Features: The Historian’s Friend is designed to enhance, rather than replace, human expertise in analyzing historical sources. Through case studies in an extended article, the creator demonstrates how to, for example, connect 1930s advertisements to broader historical themes, transcribe and translate old manuscripts, and generate visual data from historical records.

Among its many capabilities, The Historian’s Friend can can examine historical images or texts, identify the language, medium, and possible audience. It can also provide a detailed discussion on the period, events, and cultural backdrop that surround the source. In addition, it can supply “exhaustive” analysis of historical images or texts, identifying and explaining every detail, and can transcribe text from historical images. The Historian’s Friend can even suggest secondary sources that are relevant to the primary source you're studying.

The key takeaway is that AI tools, when thoughtfully integrated, can significantly broaden the scope and efficiency of historical research, opening new avenues for exploration and understanding, while also requiring careful consideration of their limitations and ethical use.

Tom’s Take: Despite some inaccuracies, like errors in facial recognition and text transcription, The Historian’s Friend will prove valuable in saving time and offering new research perspectives. The creator sees AI as a way to democratize history, making complex analyses accessible to students and non-experts, while still requiring human oversight.

Price: Available for free as a GPT at ChatGPT

Historia is history assistant, designed to delve into the past and bring it vividly to life.

Features: Historia is a GPT (specialized chatbot) that can be accessed by ChatGPT Plus users. It provides detailed explanations of historical events, figures, and periods, and emphasizes the causes, effects, and long-term impacts of historical events. It covers a broad range of geographical areas and time periods,

Historia employs storytelling techniques and offers “interesting anecdotes, lesser-known facts, and thought-provoking questions” in its discussions with users.

Historia attempts to maintain accuracy by cross-referencing with reputable historical sources. That said, Historia might hallucinate at times so it’s important to analyze its responses, which is a great skill building activity in and of itself.

Tom’s Take: Historia GPT specializes in historical knowledge and is trained on a dataset specifically curated for historical content. So Historia GPT is designed to provide more detailed and accurate information specifically related to history than ChatGPT.

Historia does often offer more depth for scholarly research, but the typical K-12 user may not need such depth. At times the output from Historia and ChatGPT are strikingly similar. That said, Historia is more useful than ChatGPT when if you want to explore a historical theme in great detail or glean some insights into lesser-known aspects of history.

Price: Free for ChatGPT users.

CharacterAI is a popular AI platform that leverages advanced artificial intelligence technology to create and interact with digital characters.

Features: CharacterAI features AI characters that can simulate conversations, behaviors, and personalities. It enables the creation of a wide range of characters, from historical figures to fictional personas, allowing for prolonged and engaging interactions that can mimic real-life conversations.

For history and social studies teachers and students, CharacterAI can bring history to life in a way that traditional textbooks cannot. Teachers can use CharacterAI to create simulations of historical personalities, allowing students to engage in dialogues with these figures.

Students can ask questions directly to these AI-powered characters, receiving responses that reflect the historical figure's known beliefs, speeches, and writings.

Tom’s Take: Character.AI is a highly engaging app, with reports indicating that young people spend about two hours a day on it. Character Voice, which enables verbal conversations, is one of its best features and a great incentive for students to engage in prolonged, open-ended conversations with historical characters like Abraham Lincoln, Cleopatra, and Martin Luther.

The app features its own language learning model, unlike Hello History, which uses GPT-3.5. Conversations are private; Character.AI creators cannot see the conversations users have with their characters. Character.AI can be a great enticement for students to engage in conversations with historical characters.

Price: Basic service is free, but there is a charge for using the “c.ai+” feature, which features voice conversations

iCivics is a non-profit organization that provides free, interactive educational games and resources designed to promote civic engagement and understanding in K-12 classrooms.

Features: Developed in collaboration with educators and game designers and fronted for years by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, iCivics' AI-powered games and simulations allow students to experience the workings of government, the electoral process, and the challenges of civic participation in a fun, engaging manner.

More specifically, the games explore three branches of government (legislative, executive, judicial) and the Constitution. The games pit students in different situations and assign them civic roles to address real-world issues. The iCivics curriculum is created by educators and aligns to state and Common Core standards.

Tom's Take: iCivics is a great option for teachers who wish to create engaging, interactive learning experiences for their students that promote civic engagement and understanding. (I can remember listening to Justice O'Connor at a National Council for Social Studies conference years ago passionately championing iCivics and lamenting the lack of civics education in U.S. schools.)

History and social studies teachers can use iCivics to create immersive experiences that foster civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions.

Price: iCivics offers its educational games and resources for free.

History Timelines is an AI tool that allows users to create detailed timelines about various historical events or topics.

Features: With History Timelines, users can easily demonstrate the chronological sequence of events and illustrate how these events transpired. To create a timeline, users simply input the desired events or topics, along with their dates.

History Timelines organizes the inputted information and generates a visual representation of the timeline.

Tom's Take: History Timelines is easy to use and offers scustomization options to adapt the timelines to various objectives.

One of the best features of History Timelines is its ability to verify timelines submitted by users, ensuring that the information they contain is accurate and reliable.

To me, this feature lends credibility to History Timelines as a useful resource for educators and history students who want to create and explore timelines in a reliable manner.

In addition to creating timelines from scratch, users can also view and explore top verified timelines created by other users on the platform.

Price: Free

PamPam is a simple, colorful, and fun way to make maps —including historical ones.

Features: Simply type in a prompt and view your map. For example, type “Boston historical sites” or “Allied troop movement 1941-1942.” Or, you can import a list of places by simply pasting them or by adding a Google Maps link.

PamPam will create your map and you can add annotations, such as text and stickers, and labels You can also add routes (such as a walking path) and highlight an area of the map (with their built-in highlighter.)

In addition, there are templates you can choose from and different ways to import content, including Google MyMaps, Google Sheets, link and text.

Also included is a PamPam chatbot , so you can ask questions about the locations on your map.

In addition, you can share your PamPam creation with others — as you would a Google document. Nobody needs a PamPam account to view the maps. If you wish, you can even edit a map together with a colleague or student.

Tom’s Take: With its simple, colorful, and interactive interface, PamPam will be a hit with students. PamPam’s combination of user-friendly design, powerful features, and collaborative capabilities makes it a great choice for teachers and students looking to create interactive maps effortlessly.

Price: Free for up to 3 maps per month. Pro account is $12 a month.

Parlay is a tool powered by artificial intelligence that aids in conducting class discussions based on given topics or texts.

Features: Parlay has the ability to formulate written or live discussion activities, boasting features such as secret identities, peer feedback, model submissions, and more. Additionally, it offers analytics and insights into student participation and performance.

Teachers have the option to search or browse discussion topics in Parlay Universe or create their own. The Parlay Genie is a tool infused with AI that assists in creating prompts where teachers can choose the number of questions they want, input the topic, and select the grade level.

Teachers can decide whether the activity will be conducted online or live. In an online discussion, teachers can choose to create a new course or select a course they have previously created. Parlay also includes an assessment tool that enables teachers to monitor, score, and provide feedback on students' participation in the discussion and their written responses.

Tom’s Take: Parlay is particularly useful for history and social studies teachers looking to promote student agency, collaboration, and critical thinking skills through structured, purposeful discussions. Its AI-powered feedback and assessment features make it an ideal tool for fostering historical understanding, civic engagement, and the development of essential communication and collaboration skills.

Price: Parlay is free for up to 30 students.

Geography Guesser is a gamified learning tool designed to engage users in geography through a fun and interactive guessing game.

Features: Geography Guesser covers a wide range of geographical features, including famous landmarks, natural wonders, cities, rivers, mountains, and deserts. It also includes both real-world locations and fictional locations from popular books, movies, and games.

Geography Guesser generates images of locations, prompting players to visually identify the place. Places are selected randomnly, to maka the game experience unpredictable. And the mix of real and fictional places encourages players to use both geographical knowledge and cultural literacy.

Geography Guesser does provide clues, and these hints are designed to be educational, delving into geographical or cultural aspects of the location.

Tom’s Take: Geography Guesser’s unique blend of both real and fictional locations is bound to engage students and foster a desire to learn more about the locations and their history.

Price: Access for free at ChatGPT.

Geopolitics GPT is a specialized AI chatbot focused on analyzing and interpreting global political dynamics and international relations

Features: Geopolitics GPT provides detailed insights into global conflicts, alliances, and political strategies.

The AI is particularly adept at responding to specific geopolitical contexts or scenarios. Users can ask about particular regions, conflicts, or alliances, and receive tailored, comprehensive analyses​.

It's designed for a wide audience, including students, researchers, journalists, and professionals in international relations. Its ability to break down complex geopolitical concepts makes it accessible to both experts and those new to the field​

Tom’s Take: Geopolitics is easy to use, featuring conversation starters and prompts that help users explore specific geopolitical topics or theories.

The GPT integrates various geopolitical theories, making it useful for academic purposes and for those seeking to understand different schools of thought in international relations. It has a 4.2 rating out out of 5, based on 69 reviews.

Price: Free to access at ChatGPT.

Questionwell is a teacher-created AI platform that generates a boundless supply of questions based on input reading material.

Features: Simply add a topic or input some reading, and Questionwell will write multiple choice, fill in the blank, short answer, and essential questions that can be exported to various platforms.

Questionwell allows teachers to input any topic and reading material, such as a book, an article, a video, or a website, and generate questions based on the content and the level of difficulty. Teachers can choose from four types of questions: multiple choice, fill in the blank, short answer, and essential. They can also edit, delete, or add questions as they wish. By default, the AI is set to try to produce 20 unique questions.

Questionwell also provides learning objectives and standards alignment for each question set. Teachers can export the questions to various platforms, such as Google Forms, Microsoft Forms, Moodle, Canvas, and Quizlet, and use them for assessment, review, or enrichment purposes.

Tom’s Take: QuestionWell is an excellent tool for creating rich, varied questioning activities that help promote critical thinking and language proficiency. Its AI-powered question generation and data analytics features make it particularly useful for differentiating instruction and supporting personalized learning. However, the free features are minimal, so you have to buy a paid subscription if you want to align questions to Standards expressly.

Price: Free for educators; Paid plan for extra features is $7/month or $70/year.