Walk students through the contents of LaunchPad.

Visit the student welcome unit on the home page, which offers brief descriptions of all the great content available in LaunchPad, and discuss with students how utilizing some of the self-assessment tools, such as the timeline activities and map quizzes, and taking notes with the Guided Reading Exercises will help them succeed in your course. You can access the student welcome page via the table of contents on the home page.

Assign LearningCurve adaptive quizzing so students come to class prepared.

Because LearningCurve is automatically graded, it provides an easy way to ensure your students focus on the topics and concepts they need the most help with. When they get a question wrong, feedback tells them why and links them to the section of the book in which the topic is discussed. After reading the section, they can return to LearningCurve to answer the question. For more information on the research behind LearningCurve and to find out why students and instructors are so enthusiastic about LearningCurve, visit learningcurveworks.com.

Assign the documents in the chapters and the Document Project units to teach students to consider evidence like a historian.

The Guided Analysis, Comparative Analysis, and Solo Analysis documents in each chapter work as a progression of primary sources that moves from a single source with guiding annotations to paired sources that lead students to understand each source better through comparison, and then to an individual source for students to use to hone their skills. Each chapter ends with a Document Project, which includes approximately five textual and visual sources on a single theme and "Interpret the Evidence" and "Put It in Context" questions to help students analyze the documents and connect them to the historical narrative. Short, assignable multiple-choice quizzes follow each primary source.

Assign Document Projects for Exploring American Histories and the accompanying "Thinking through Sources" activities to teach students to build arguments and practice historical thinking skills.

“Thinking through Sources” activities extend and amplify the Document Projects for Exploring American Histories unit. The activities include primary sources accompanied by post-reading, auto-graded multiple-choice quizzes. Auto-graded “Organizing the Evidence” and “Draw Conclusions from the Evidence” activities guide students in assessing their understanding of the sources, organizing the sources for use in an essay, and drawing conclusions from them.

Explore LaunchPad’s assignment options or create your own.

LaunchPad for Exploring American Histories includes additional assignments and support materials not found in the main e-book and it gives you the tools to create your own assignments and quizzes. You can find multiple-choice summative quizzes for each chapter in the table of contents on the homepage and in the Resources menu, which is accessible by clicking on the Resources icon on the left-hand side of the homepage or by clicking “Add from Resources” at the top of the homepage. If you want to create your own quiz, you can click “Add new” above the table of contents and choose the quiz option to find the test bank created for Exploring American Histories. To find lecture strategies and classroom activity suggestions from the Instructor’s Resource Manual, ready-made lecture outlines in presentation slides, outline maps that you can download and print, additional primary sources not in the textbook, and more, investigate the Instructor Resources in the homepage table of contents or the Resource menu.

Help students get quick access to LaunchPad while they wait for permanent access.

Students can access LaunchPad while they wait for their financial aid disbursement by clicking “I need to pay later” on the login page. Students who need technical support can click the “Help” link in the upper right corner to get help right away.

Find a full tour of all LaunchPad assets plus technical support in the Help area.

Get further support and guidance by accessing the Help at the upper right corner on the Home screen. Choose “User Guide” for a complete instructions for setting up your LaunchPad course, including help for student and instructor access, how to set up your course and make assignments, and for a full tour of each asset available in your LaunchPad (see “What’s in Your LaunchPad? History” and then choose the name of your book). You can also access technical support options from the Help menu.