With the lazy days of summer upon us, we are loving school. Sounds kind of like an oxymoron, doesn't it? We are "officially" out of school so my children think...bahaha. Honestly, isn't school just a part of life? Everyday is a learning experience. I was taught how to say hello in Hawaiian on Sunday! I've already forgotten how now but I digress.
If you are looking for something to enhance your child's education without them even knowing - then this review is for you! Mobile Education has produced several apps to help you with that endeavor.
From the website...
The Mobile Education Store was born from a father’s desire to help his special needs daughter. Our family had invested thousands of dollars in special education software, and almost always came away from the experience disappointed. Not only were the programs incredibly expensive, but they lacked the variety of content and engaging play that makes our daughter WANT to play. We exist to fill the large gap that exists between the availability and cost of commercial special needs software and the needs of everyday parents.
I think they have succeeded with that goal. We reviewed The Story Builder app designed for the 4th generation ipod touch (the one with a camera) or the iphone. You can find a list of requirements here to see if your device is compatible. We used it on our ipod. The app is recommended for ages 6 and up. Sarah (my 3rd grader, 8 years old) and I had so much fun telling each other stories back and forth. She would create a story using the question prompts included in Story Builder such as the ones below.
She would hit the record button to record her ending for the story. You are given several question prompts and pictures to complete your story. When you finish your story, you can play it back and even email it to someone! Sarah and I took turns making our stories and each time I would give her something I wanted her to make sure she included such as a strong verb or a quality adjective. We only worked on one part of speech at the time and in the beginning we just created the stories with no additional requirements. The app includes 3 different levels. In each level, the degree of difficulty increases such as in level 3 there are no question prompts. This in no way felt like any type of school or story building at all! It felt like sitting around the campfire making up stories! I have created this image of school in my mind as sitting at a table with paper and pencil and drilling. I am slowly learning that is not the way it has to be.
Story Builder won the best reading app of 2011 by the Huffington Post.
Story Builder is designed to help children accomplish the following goals:
1) Improve paragraph formation
2) Improve integration of ideas
3) Improve higher level abstractions by inference.
Extensive use of audio clips promotes improved auditory processing for special needs children with autism spectrum disorders or sensory processing disorders. Story Builder offers a rich and fun environment for improving the ability to create a narrative.
- Record feature allows students to record narrative in their own voice
- 3 levels of play
- Simple and intuitive interface to record narrative
- Recorded answers are stitched together to create complete narrative
- 50 distinct story lines to create narratives from
- Over 500 audio clips of questions to guide narrative
- Optional question text and answer introduction reinforcement
Don't forget to check out what my fellow crew members thought about this app and other apps available from Mobile Education .
**Disclaimer: As a member of The Schoolhouse Review Crew, I received a free app to review. The opinions here are my honest and true evaluation.
Great review! Looks like a fun app to have. I am on The Crew, too.
ReplyDeleteThanks for linking up at the Weekend Hop on Blessed Beyond a Doubt. I look forward to getting to know you.
I'm looking forward to getting to know you too, Jill. Thanks for such a great idea!
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