The "Best Apps" Aren't Necessarily the Best - Wandering through the vast app landscape

We are rapidly learning that the many lists (some of which are linked here) of "best apps for kids" don't necessarily lead us to the apps that we consider of value or able to meet the goals we have for our iPad program.

So far we have downloaded for free or purchased (for review) 49 apps. Many were selected based on their presence on a "Best" list. Our teachers are exploring them, and most importantly, handing them over to their students or their own children, to see what happens. We find we are most frequently disappointed, especially with the apps intended to help students develop literacy or math skills. These apps tend to either be far too simplistic, too single-purpose (just focusing on one isolated skill), or just too much of a silly game. There are a few the teachers can imagine using, but even those could be made far better.

So what are we looking for? If our use of technology with small children is to have value, it should offer unique experiences and opportunities for discovery and self-expression. Since practice is important as children learn to form letters and numbers, the apps that lead a child through the steps of correctly forming letters (and don't tolerate cheating!) will offer a responsive, self-correcting, and individualized way of learning to write letters. Our favorite at the moment for this is iWriteWords.

We are looking for a way to facilitate digital storytelling on the iPad. There are many "story" apps out there, but we have yet to find one that allows students the freedom to tell their own story with their own illustrations AND record a narrative to go with it. There are far too many apps with pre-fab art that limits the story to a set pattern. Anyone found the perfect app for our needs?

Our Math Coordinator is not very pleased with the math apps we've reviewed so far. Most of them are drill and kill style simple math problems that don't support the development of concepts, and make little use of the interactive touch capacity of the iPad. She and I do agree that Motion Math is a great app. In Motion Math a ball drops from the sky and you must direct it by tipping the iPad to the point on the bar that represents a fraction. It requires quick thinking and lots of good estimation skills to decide where on the bar to send it for, say 3/7 or 4/9. This is not a Kindergarten app, unfortunately, but the fourth graders love it! I am very happy with Coin Math. This app offers true to life pictures of coins and presents challenges from beginner (match the coin to its value) to counting and then adding coins. The coins can be moved around on the screen, so students can learn to group them to count by familiar numbers, and organize them to see the quantity better.

So far those are our only favorites. We are reviewing the apps on a chart you are welcome to explore: Apps and Reviews Framework. Please let us know if you've discovered apps that fit our expectations!

Spell Blocks

I found the Spell Blocks app to be a useful tool for helping kindergarteners reinforce letter-sound correspondence and word-building skills. Students listen to a word, and then build the word by dragging and dropping the scrambled-up letters of the word into empty spaces. We do similar work in our classroom with sets of letter tiles, but the advantage of doing this type of activity with the iPad is that it could be used at a more independent work time, because the student is prompted by the computerized voice and gets feedback as to whether he/she has built the right word -- without the teacher needing to be present. This means that a child who needs extra reinforcement with letter sounds can easily get practice without waiting for a teacher to be available to give feedback.

Features I liked about this app:

1. The user (teacher or student) can specify the difficulty level and whether extra letters are added. That way it can be more or less customized to each child's word-building skill level.
2. Also, the user can adjust whether the screen advances automatically to the next word, and whether the words appear in a pre-set order or randomly. I think the random option is very useful for a child who may be working repeatedly on the same level, so that he/she does not just repeatedly build the same words, and instead gets a different set of words to build each time.
3. Also, I liked the simple way that the app deals with student responses. When a child puts a letter in the wrong place, the letter simply bounces back to the bottom of the screen; when the word is built correctly, a burst of fireworks appears on the screen.
   

Features that I didn't like as much about this app:

1. It was sometimes hard to hear the target word. The volume never got particularly loud (even when set as high as possible), and the target word was spoken quickly. When we do this type of word-building activity as a teacher-led activity, we make sure to stretch out the sounds to give students the scaffolding they need to break down the word and put it back together with tiles. That kind of support isn't offered by Spell Blocks.
2. Also, I think the program would be better if the word were said in a sentence, to emphasize the meaning and put it in a context. We use this approach when we do teacher-led word-building activities.
   

I watched one of our lower-level readers try out the Spell Blocks app in our classroom. She clearly was very motivated to work with it, and she reported that she had fun and was learning a lot about how to spell words. She quickly got the hang of the app, and she learned to deal with the difficulty of hearing the target word by getting in the habit of pressing the "repeat" button and then saying the word out loud.

Students can get the hang of this app quickly, and I think it'd be useful in a kindergarten class during an independent work time or choice time. Students may need a little support from a teacher in understanding the computerized voice and in utilizing the repeat button.

Story Patch App

Learning how to use the iPad and navigate through different apps has certainly been an adventure. I originally assumed that the iPad would be very easy for me to explore and figure out. During my explorations, I have come to realize that there are certain tasks on the iPad that are very intuitive for me while others are not.

After playing around with several different apps I decided to take a more in depth look at StoryPatch. It is an app that allows children to create stories in a variety of ways. Below are several options that kids can take in order to create a story.

1. Write your words and use your own photos: This option gives the most freedom for children to create a more personalized story.
2. Write your own words and choose from a wide variety of images in the gallery. This is a fun and easy way to add simple illustrations to your story. A child can experiment with different ideas and manipulate the size and placement of the images. The only drawback is that you are limited to the selection in the gallery.
3. Choose from a set of topics and the app writes a story for you. In this option, your main focus is to play around with creating illustrations.

I like the idea that kids can write a story but I am not convinced that this app offers a better experience than that provided by simply using pencil and paper. On the other hand, I do see the potential for children to play around with quickly creating a story in a fun and easy way.

iPad Exploration

Since I've been experimenting with the iPad, I have been most challenged by learning how to navigate the apps. As a kindergarten teacher, technology has not played much of a role in my teaching or in my professional life. Now that I'm tasked with getting to know this device and the apps, I'm already much more comfortable using technology professionally.

I have "listened in" on an aimschat on twitter about teachers using technology. I have found wonderful resources on diigo about technology in education (although I'm still not entirely sure how to use diigo). I have joined a PLN (professional learning network) to hopefully exchange ideas about iPads in kindergarten. I have tried out many apps for kindergarteners.
I never would have done this without the iPad. I never would have done this on my school issued laptop (which I lock away in my classroom each night). The iPad is easy to keep with me and is always on. I can flip it open and explore easily and quickly.

My iPad not only holds promise for classroom review and exploration, but also for my own growth as a teacher. If only every teacher had one.

When Things Go Wrong - a work around for finding deleted files on an iPad

Our AIMS Technology list just carried an interesting question and answer that I have gained permission to share here.

The question was, Does anyone know how to recover data (e.g. Dragon Dictation or Notes) that have been deleted on an iPad?

Stephen Monn replied:

I think you may be disappointed to find that files deleted on an iOS device are actually deleted. The lack of a true file system in iOS makes finding things difficult but not impossible. Mounting a iOS device will only show you the media area files. To see application files the best tool I have found is iPhone Explorer which is available for both Windows and OS X.

Connect your iOS device and start iPhone Explorer and you will see the device in the window with two main folders, Apps and Media. Media has the songs, photos books, etc. In the Apps folder you will find a folder for each app which contains that apps' files including data files. If your files do still exist on that device this is where you will find them.

You will have to scan the apps carefully as they are not in order alphabetically by name and cannot be sorted.

Later, when responding to my request to post his response, he added:

When using iPhone Explorer to move files onto an iOS device they may not show up immediately and you may have to use the import icon to pull them from the iTunes synch area as in Pages on the iPad. Other apps will show you the file immediately, Good Reader, for example. These are the things we must tolerate on a device that has no file system or many file systems, depending on your view. It is still so much better than the steps needed to do similar things on my old Treo.

So thanks to Stephen, we have a way forward if we're looking for lost files. I'm interested in other solutions from anyone with similar experiences.

A Visit to Harford Day School

We are gathering a small consortium of local schools that are implementing, or preparing to implement iPads. On Tuesday, tech coordinators from National Cathedral School, Concord Hill School, and I drove to Bel Air, Maryland to visit Harford Day School.  This fall they purchased 20 iPads and 20 iPod Touches to see what they could do with them. The iPads are stored on a rolling cart and are shared throughout the K-8 school.

We first visited a Kindergarten class where students were have a 20 minute session, some using selected apps on the iPads at a table in the classroom, some working on website activities on eMacs in the small classroom computer lab.  The students using iPads were happily engaged practicing math with "Dino Math". The teacher explained that they use the iPads once a week to review and practice math, although they do some work with phonics using "Pocket Phonics" and "Digraphs and Phonics" as well. In general, it seemed that the iPads serve as a practice and review tool.

The iPads were due in the First Grade next, so the cart was wheeled there where a small group of students were waiting. They selected from a choice of apps written on the whiteboard. These students also used "Dino Math", while others engaged in Tangram activities, and "Undersea Math". The iPads have about seven pages of apps, since they have selected apps for teachers and for students from grades K-8. There was a variety of choices for Tangrams, the best of which was called just that, "Tangrams".  We noticed that since the version of "Undersea Math" was the "lite" version (meaning free), the younger students repeatedly clicked on the offer to upgrade and had to be helped to get back to the game. It reminded me of the value of paying for something to avoid the advertisements!

Next we wheeled the cart to an upper grade music class where they were going to be using them to do research. The cart is neatly arranged with iPads filed sideways and a power cord for each slot. As far as having a cart goes, this is a very practical arrangement.  In the Tech office they have an interesting set up with USB adapters strapped together to allow 10 iPads to update at a time.

We are looking forward to speaking with more colleagues who are launching iPad experiments in a couple of weeks when we meet to learn about AirWatch as a means of wirelessly updating and managing iPads.

Ten Frame App

I took a few minutes to explore the Ten Frame app and alas, that is all it really takes to have the full experience. The Ten Frame app is simply an empty Ten Frame that the user can fill at will.


If you are so inclined, you can even fill up the Ten Frame with as many dots as you like-who needs 10? How about 20? How about 2 dots piled into one box?


As a tool to teach children the concept of ten, I think the Ten Frame should only allow a user to place one dot in a square. I also would prefer if there was some sort of timing mechanism that would click in so that once a user placed say, 1 dot, the rest of the frame would then freeze up allowing the user to see the 1 dot in relation to 9 empty squares.


I also think that the user should only be able to enter dots in a particular order, or at least the dots will align themselves in a particular order. The order I would propose would be left to right, starting with the first row. On a related note, I think the Ten Frame should also be oriented with 2 rows of 5 versus 2 columns of 5.


In a more "advanced" version of the Ten Frame, a number sentence could also appear:


ex. 1+?=10 or 1+9=10


Or a question could be asked, "How many more dots to fill in the Ten Frame?"





At an introductory level, I think there should be some sort of "tutorial".


The user would be presented with a series of Ten Frames and accompanying questions.


#1: An empty Ten Frame+the question: How many dots do you see? Answer 0


#2: A Ten Frame with 1 dot +the question: How many dots do you see? Answer 1


etc..


until the user reaches the Ten Frame with 10 dots.


For the first time user, say, the K student, this orientation process will hopefully allow them to see and learn to "read" a Ten Frame automatically, so that it becomes the quick visual tool it is supposed to be.

In its current form, this Ten Frame app is empty.