The recent gathering of our app review advisors featured a novel activity, "pass the iPad," in which the distinguished crew shared their favorite apps.
"The one I love the best right now is How Rocket Learned to Read," said Lisa Von Drasek, who blogs at "EarlyWord" and is the coordinator of school services and children's librarian at New York's Bank Street College of Education School for Children. "It's got everything I want. You can skip around. It focuses on a small part of the picture and zooms out. You can record your own voice or not. It's got a game. It can shake—I like to shake the trees with the letters. It's developmentally perfect. Fits every rubric that I'm looking for at a great price point."
Matt Bassett, executive producer at One Hundred Robots, a creator of children's book apps, likes The Three Little Pigs. "That is in my top five book apps," he said. "And it's successful on many levels. One of which is it will read to you. You can change from English to French. You tap on a word and it'll show you a picture of what that is." Warren Buckleitner, founding editor of Children's Technology Review and a contributor to the New York Times "Gadgetwise" blog, adds that the toggling between languages is in real time. "So it's sort of a state-of-the-art app."
"Great illustration, great animation—just very well done," said Bassett.
Called Visual History, Rome by our advisors, Virtual History ROMA exemplifies the wow factor of digital content, while underscoring the inherent nature of apps, which offer features and functionality that users—and reviewers—may not immediately be aware of.
"My husband, a social work librarian and history buff, was just gaga over Virtual History-Rome because this is something a book doesn't do," said Jennifer Hubert Swan author of the blog "Reading Rants," library dept. chair and middle school librarian at Little Red School House & Elisabeth Irwin High School in New York City. "You can pull up the images and turn them around. Did you turn the ships around?
"I didn't!," said Von Drasek.
"Rome is amazing!," said Hubert Swan. "If I had a DK book on Rome, I couldn't pull the centurion out, turn him around, and look at all of his armor. It was all named, and then when you touched the name, it told you what it was. I mean, I was astonished. You can't do this with a book."
An across-the-board favorite among the group was Motion Math. The award-winning app, which presents the challenging concept of fractions to young children, seems to occupy that magical space bridging games and learning.
Pam Abrams, director of partnership development and strategy at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, said, "My 16-year-old son recently asked to organize the apps on my iPad. And when I came back it was very neat and sorted into two big folders, one called 'games' and the other 'educational.' I planned to look at this app that I had downloaded called Motion Math. He had put it in 'games,' not 'educational.' And I thought, well, that's the sign of a good app, that he didn't consider this math thing educational. He considered it a game."
Motion Math was created by two educator/developers out of the Stanford School of Education. Indeed, many terrific products are coming out of small developers, two- and three-person shops, says Buckleitner. These includeDuck Duck Moose, which produced the Wheels on the Bus app, winner of the "Best Children's App" KAPi Award at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show.
Buckleitner also likes Puzzle Agent by Telltale Inc. "A sweet app," he said.
Reconciling the linear nature of books was another interesting discussion topic (and not one entirely resolved in our hour and half long meeting). Laura Pearle, librarian at the Hackley School in Tarrytown, NY, noted that young readers need to be able to find their place in a book presented in digital format. "That why I like the Peter Rabbit app so much because there's that little pulldown where you can go to any page in the book," said Betsy Bird, children's librarian at the New York Public Library's Children's Center at 42nd Street and author of the blog "A Fuse #8 Production."
Of course, not all successful book apps follow a smooth path from analog to digital form. Case in point, The Monster at the End of This Book.
"Who would have thought that Grover would star in the best kids' book app around? The Monster at the End of This Bookwas not a beautiful book to begin with. But the app did something really wonderful by taking the best of technology and integrating it with development. It had everything that we've been talking about: good content, developmentally appropriate, beautiful graphics," said Abrams.
This a great way to learn about this new technology (or at least new to me!) The link to How Rocket Learned to Read shows sample pages, and there's a glaring mistake on one page- "practice" is spelled "pratice."
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