World's Worst Pet - vocabulary app

World's Worst Pet is a free iPad-only app for students in 3rd grade through 8th grade to practice Tier 2 vocabulary items. Tier 2 vocabulary means frequently occurring words that appear in a variety of topics and across disciplines.  English language learners pick up Tier 1 vocabulary from their peers and every day life. Tier 3 vocabulary is the kind of academic language, often subject-specific, that even native-speakers of a language have to be taught in school. English language learners get Tier 3 language from direct instruction, just like their native-speaker peers, but tier 2 vocabulary is often their weakness.

This app has 6 different levels, C to H, for grades 3 through 8. Level C has 10 different sets of vocabulary, each with 10 words, and Levels D through H have 20 sets of vocabulary each with 10 related words for a total of 1100 words! At the beginning of each vocabulary set, students have the chance to read clear explanations with examples of how each word is used. Spanish cognates are included in the definitions for many of the words. Each of the ten words is clearly pronounced (by a real person, not a computerized voice) as part of the definition. If they make mistakes as they play the games (rescuing the "world's worst pet" Snargg from a variety of predicaments), the app will show students the definitions again, and they can return to the definitions at any point. One weakness as far as I'm concerned is that graphics could have been included in some of the definitions, which would have made it even more language-learner friendly.

There are a variety of activities at each level that ensure that the students see each word multiple times in each series. 

Although they are essentially all multiple-choice activities, once a student gets to the end of each set there is a composition assignment that encourages the student to use the words from the set. The writing assignment provides some accountability for the students beyond simply guessing their way through the game. Levels C, D and E vocabulary sets finish with one of the following types of writing: 

• writing an opinion
• writing an informational essay
• writing a narrative

Levels F, G and H finish with 

• writing an argument
• writing an informational essay
• writing a narrative

Just like any other teaching material, this app will be most effective when it is part of a carefully thought-out lesson plan.  I can see this app working well with small groups or on-on-one. Students should be discouraged from guessing as this defeats the purpose of the activity. Having students work in pairs and encouraging constructive conversations about the answers might be helpful. (Another reason for using the app in a focused way is that I can see students eventually getting bored with the games as they remain the same from level to level.

Because each set of words has a specific focus and the words all relate to that topic, rather than have students simply work their way through each topic, one after the other, I would be tempted to have the students work on topics that specifically related to other work going on in class. Having students simply work their way through the units with no connection to other work going on in the classroom is not going to get the best results. For example, the theme for Level C set 4 is "The People’s Government" and it would make sense to use this unit when working on related material in social studies. Unfortunately, the app itself does not contain a list for teachers of the topics and their word lists . . . so, for your convenience, I've started work on creating a resource for you. Follow the links below to see the vocabulary in each vocabulary set and the writing prompt at the end of each unit.

Level C topics and vocabulary
Level D topics and vocabulary (incomplete) 

 

Rainbow Sentences

Rainbow Sentences, $7.99 from Mobile Education Tools, is designed "to help students improve their ability to construct grammatically correct sentences by using color coded visual cues. The who, what, where, and why parts of sentences are color coded to help students recognize and understand how combinations of these parts create basic sentence structure."

The intention is that students will learn how to recognize the parts of sentences such as nouns, verbs, and prepositions, improve their understanding of how combinations of these parts create basic sentence structure. In practice, I have found that it is tempting for students to use other strategies to complete the sentences. They will start by putting the word with an uppercase letter first, and the word with a period after it at the end of the sentence, and then start placing the rest of the words based on their length, as the spaces they are to be dragged to give an indication as to the length of the missing word. This is not an app I would have a student use alone, even though the recordkeeping in the app would allow them to do so. As my students use this app, I sit with them and ask them questions so that in answering my questions they can complete the sentence. Students have the opportunity to record their sentences in their own voice to improve their receptive and expressive language skills. I have found this app useful with young English language learners with language delays.


FEATURES
-168 images to create sentence from - plenty of variety
-Intuitive drag and drop to create sentences - easy for students to get the hang of
-Words are spoken as they are being dragged for non readers - very helpful, so the focus of the activity can be on the sentence structure rather than reading individual words
-Words can be color coded for added visual support
-Word groups can be selected to simplify sentence construction
-6 levels of sentence complexity
-Pictograph lessons to help students learn proper sentence construction
-Record feature allows students to record sentences in their own voice
-Save and email recorded sentences
-Students earn puzzle pieces during play to encourage continued play. Initially I was skeptical as to how motivating this would be - but when I had a student who was used to this app try another app from the same company that did not have the puzzle reward, she was disappointed that the puzzle was not there!
-Puzzles come to life once level is complete

National Archives DocsTeach

The National Archives website docsteach.org is a great source of material for teachers, especially teacher of history and social studies. It features thousands of primary sources and learning activities. Register for a free account and you can borrow from and modify an ever-expanding collection of activities, plus create unique ones using online templates. Any activities you create are automatically shared with other Docsteach users to use or modify.

The recently released free app Docsteach app designed to work with the site allows iPad users to:

• "Choose a historical era or topic to find an activity based on primary source documents such as the US Constitution, the canceled check for the purchase of Alaska, and Thomas Edison’s patent drawing for the light bulb.
• Participate in DocsTeach activities made with the Focusing on Details, Making Connections, Finding a Sequence, Mapping History, Weighing the Evidence, or Seeing the Big Picture tools.
• Zoom and inspect individual pages of documents, drawings, maps, and photographs using the controls in the document viewing window."

Because teachers register to use the site, activities they create can be tagged with “Classroom Codes” so that students can find activities specifically assigned by their own teachers. Alternatively, students can browse to look for activities on a particular topic. A wifi connection is recommended for using this app.

Read more about Docsteach and the new app at the United States National Archive blog.

Grammar - parts of speech

As an ESL teacher, I obviously have to spend a good portion of my teaching time working with my students on their grammar. I want my students to be able to communicate effectively and incorrect grammar often gets in the way of that communication. It is obviously helpful when you are trying to help students improve their writing if you have a shared vocabulary. If they don't know what a adjective or an adverb is, it doesn't help to tell them "You used an adverb here instead of an adjective." Mainstream students need to know this vocabulary too - especially because it does turn up on standardized tests - "Which of the words in this sentence is a noun?" (I'm not even going to get started though on whether we should even be doing all the standardized testing that we do  - that's a whole 'nuther blog!)

So, someone was asking me the other day if I've found any apps to help kids with their grammar. If you want them to be able to identify the parts of speech, yes there is an app (or two!) for that!

 Grammar Dragon is a free app that asks you to identify what part of speech specific words in a sentence are. There is no instruction as to what the parts of speech are. The 'game' is essentially a multiple choice worksheet with some animation added, though it is sufficiently game-like to keep kids interested for a while. The grammar dragon has captured all of your friends from the castle. You must rescue a different person on each level by correctly identifying various parts of speech. Grammar terms used in the game include: adjective, pronoun, conjunction, preposition, noun, interjection, verb.

This is intended as a one person game, but I could see two students working on it together. It can be a tricky game for ESL students if they don't know all the vocabulary  - sometimes they can mistakes simply because they don't understand the vocabulary. On the other hand, if they have a good sense of sentence structure and the vocabulary required for the game, it is possible for them to get the answer right without actually understanding the sentence they are reading.




The traditional Mad Libs games are also good for students to learn the basic parts of speech. There are several of them available, and there are even some that are free. Watch for the advertising on the free ones though, and for the in-app purchase options that allow you to buy more stories. (Remember you can turn off the ability to make in-app purchases in the settings, and it is also a good idea to always change your payment method back to  'None' after you've made a purchase, in addition to remembering to log out of the app store.)

Mad Libs (free) - the traditional Mad Libs game. The name Mad Libs is owned by the Penguin publishing company who put out the books and now the app. They have a free version of Mad Libs available for download but, of course, what they want you to do is to purchase more so it only includes 4 stories. A $3.99 in-app purchase gets you another 20 stories. There are 2 different in-app purchases available, for a total of 40 stories. The game does not always specifically ask for a part of speech - sometimes it asks for something like "a kind of liquid." It asks for adjectives and adverbs, and specifies plural or singular when it is asking for a noun.


WordVenture! (Free, some advertising)  - Although per story this works out more expensive than Mad Libs if you buy the additional stories, I like the fact that this app gives definitions and examples of the kind of words as it asks for them. Grammar terms used in WordVenture! include adverb, verb, past tense verb, noun, exclamation, verb ending with "ing", adverb, adjective, noun, plural noun. It comes with 3 stories - 30 more are available at 3 for $0.99. The three free stories could serve as a good introduction to the concept of the game as this app offers some support, and then students can move on to one of the other apps.



Silly Stories Lite (free, some advertising),  Silly Stories ($1.99) and Silly Stories - iPad edition ($1.99). More Mad Libs-type stories. The full version of Silly Stories lets you share your completed stories online, and I would hope it has no advertising. Stories that are posted online are associated with the account that posted them. The company does have a policy of not posting stories automatically - they are reviewed for appropriateness first.  (The company needs to do some editing of their site though - they spell inappropriate as 'inapproperate' and currently the site says "Additionally, all Silly Stories are reviewed before they are allowed to be made pubically available." Hmmm . . . I hope their stories are better edited!) Once a story has been uploaded and approved, it cannot be deleted from the website, but the company says they can disassociate it from the account that uploaded it. Grammar terms used in Silly Stories include: verb, past tense, adverb, adjective, plural.

SparkleFish is a MadLibs-type app that doesn't involve any typing.  Record the words it asks for and they are then included in a story that you listen to rather than read. SparkleFish is free, with in-app purchases for additional stories, ($0.99 for each story pack of 5 stories.) Grammar terms used in the free stories provided in SparkleFish include adverb, singular noun, plural noun, verb past tense, verb ending in 'ing', adjective, verb. Other terms include singular body part, beverage, liquid, number, ordinal number.

With all of the Mad Libs-type stories, (just as with the books) the students will have more fun if they are not working on them alone. Students could work on a story with a partner and read it aloud (and giggle) together. If you have more than one iDevice, two students could both work on the same story on their own and then share their different versions once they've added all the words. Once they've played the apps a few times, rather than buy new stories, the stronger students could then write their own stories. If you have computers available where the stories could be saved as templates, you could then build up a selection of student-generated stories that could either be used on the computer, or printed out for completion.

(Originally posted July 2011, updated March 2012)

Storytelling with Scribble Press

Scribble Press is another storytelling app. It is currently free and is for iPad only. In some ways it is very similar to StoryKit.

Scribble Press has 50 built-in story templates that you can use as starting points for a story, or you can choose to start with a blank book. I like the fact that even if you start with a template story you can add to the text or edit it once it is on the pages of your book. You can also add more pages if you want to. Like StoryKit, there are no choices of font or font size.

There are plenty of options for illustrating your story. There is a vast array of 'markers' in many colors - enough to provide plenty of options, but not an infinite color palette that would make it difficult to match a color if you wanted to. If you prefer, you can add a photo to a page by taking one with the iPad 2 camera or choosing one from your own photo gallery on your iPad. There are also some 'stickers' included that allow you to quickly add some images to your story.

Finished stories can be read in the app itself by tapping on the front cover of the book to open it. Stories can also be saved from the app as an ePub file that can be added to iBooks to build a library of student-created books on the iPad. Unlike some other ePub books, you cannot change the font size in the book when you are reading it in iBooks.

Stories can also be shared by choosing "Email a link" which uploads them to the Scribble Press website and sends an email with the address of the story to anyone you send the email message to. Your iPad must be set up to send email to do this! Sharing a story this way does not include it in Scribble Press/ public library of books - only people who have the address can access the story. You could choose to email the link directly to people you'd like to have read the stories, or if you have a website you could link directly to your Scribble Press story from a webpage. (For some reason my school Gmail account dropped the message from Scribble Press into the spam folder - so if you send the link via email and it does not seem to show up, check your spam folder!) When visitors follow the link they can browse the story online or they can download the story as an ePub file for viewing on their own mobile device. They can choose three different formats, including for iOS and Nook. Kindle readers will need to convert the file - search for how to open an ePub file on a Kindle and you'll find lots of advice.

By choosing "Publish in Gallery" you can also choose to submit your story to be included in Scribble Press' public library of stories. All books that are to be shared publically are held for 24 hours so Scribble Press can make sure all the content is kid-friendly! Once a story has been uploaded to Scribble Press it is available for anyone to read and download.

The app is practical to use on a shared iPad because a story in progress can simply be saved. The book is saved to the 'My Books' shelf and when you open it up again instead of tapping on it to read it, you can choose Edit from the menu underneath the front cover.

The 'Order' button offers the option of paying to have stories printed. I don't see schools particularly wanting to take advantage of this option but families might. Scribble Press says single page stories can be printed on a clipboard, puzzle, notebook, or greeting card - but in reality this means the artwork from a single page story can be published as the text is removed for these products!

There are a couple of improvements I would like to see in this app. I would like to see the option of being able to add students' voices to their stories because as a language teacher I see my kids getting enormous value out of recording their stories in StoryKit or GarageBand. I would also like to be able to move the text area on a page, as I can in StoryKit, so that it is not always at the bottom of the page. Nonetheless, as a free app it is definitely worth downloading! I can see students and teachers getting lots of use out of it.


The developer says:

Scribble Press for iPad includes:
- 50 story templates
- over 500 drawing tools, including markers and stamps in a vast array of colors
- a unique sticker collection
- your own photo library
- an easy and fun to use book layout tool
- shopping cart so you can order printed copies of your book and other cool stuff
- sharing tools that make it easy to show the world – or just your family and friends – your great creation PLUS, you can use Scribble Press for iPad to read books created by other kids, from all around the world!

Here's a video tour of Scribble Press from the developer: 

Storytelling with Our Story

The free app Our Story was developed by child psychologists and education specialists at the Open University in the UK. The app is backed by solid research and the website is worth checking out as it offers suggestions for ways to use the app that are equally appropriate to other storytelling apps. 

"Reading, even in the digital age, is probably one of the most important skills that children acquire. It can be an important source of pleasure which also develops vital language and social skills. It is fundamental to most school activities, it can also open up new worlds and give access to the wealth of human knowledge. 

This app that has been developed by child psychologists and other specialists at The Open University enables young children to take part in fun games which can help develop interests and skills that will be relevant to them when they start to read." 

The app and its support pages are very clearly geared towards parents using the app with their children rather than teachers using it in the classroom. 

Some of the nice features - 

• you can create a selection of images from your photo album that you want students to use directly in the app. You can also add more photos as needed from the photo album. 
• You can add text to each image, and the text is saved so that you can reuse it if you use the same image in another story. 
• You can add a recording to each image. 
• The images are large because there is no screen real estate saved for the text - it goes over the image. 
• You can easily see how many images you have in your story and what order they are in. 
• You can use images one at a time, like flashcards, without adding them to your story. 
• You can see the text as you are recording. (It is not hidden by a recording window as it is in StoryKit for example.) 
• Text boxes are scrollable.
• It's free and there is no advertising! 

Some drawbacks - 

• You are limited to creating 10 stories. After that, if you want to create more you have to choose which of the stories you've already created you want to overwrite. 
• The app has quit on me several times as I was trying to create a story. 
• You cannot move the text boxes on the screen and they often end up obscuring part of the picture. You can double-tap on the page and the text and navigation tools will disappear. They reappear when you double-tap again. 
• Navigation is not terribly intuitive - I'm not sure that young kids could figure how to navigate back to a saved story - certainly not as easily as they could in StoryKit for example. 
• When you are 'using' a story, the icon to play audio shows up on every picture even when there is no associated audio. 
• There is no way to share the stories beyond the iDevice they're on, with the exception perhaps of an iPad2 hooked up to a projector! 

This app has some nice features and, given that it's free, it's worth the download. The inability to share the final product is a dealbreaker for me right now though in terms of using it with my ESL students. I can see uses for Our Story for social stories though - especially given the ease of adding images using the camera in a 4th generation iPod or iPad2 - and also for other adult-created stories or activities. If using the story right on the iDevice where it was created suits you, then this provides a nice alternative to other apps and can provide some variety in the look of the apps you are using. 

Storytelling with Pictello

Pictello is yet another storytelling app. It is designed for both  iPhone and iPad, but will not work on older iPod touches (2G)  or iPhones (3G). It comes from AssistiveWare, the company that created the assistive communication app Proloquo2Go. Pictello creates a book-like end product - a story of one or more pages that can have pictures and text. You can record sounds for each page, which could be a reading aloud of the text. A unique feature of Pictello however, is that it comes with built-in text-to speech voices and you can have it read aloud the text that you add to each page. You can even read some pages aloud yourself and use text-to-speech on others! The latest version highlights individual words as it does text-to-speech, which is a helpful feature for literacy goals. The current version of Pictello is localized in English, Spanish, French, German, Turkish and Dutch. North American English male and female voices are included, with children's voices and voices for 25 other languages and dialects such as Japanese available as free downloads! Pictello does not require an active Internet connection for story creation or playback.

Pictello was originally designed to create social stories, but it looks like it's a great tool for encouraging storytelling and literacy skills for all kids. However, it is significantly more expensive than the other storytelling apps I've reviewed so far. (It was $14.99 when I first wrote this and is now $18.99 as of 4 April, 2013, admittedly with some new features.) The stories you create can be viewed on the device where they are created, within Pictello, or they can be shared via the Pictello server - but only with other Pictello users. The latest version will let you save your stories to Dropbox as Pictello stories or PDFs. If I were working with students who were able to write their own stories but unable to read them aloud, I would be more interested in this app specifically because of the text-to-speech feature which I've not seen in the other storytelling apps. For my regular ed. students, the free app StoryKit is very similar, is free, and StoryKit stories can easily be shared via the app's website.

Assistiveware provides detailed descriptions on their website to help you get started using Pictello.  a4cwsn has several videos that give detailed information on using Pictello. (Here is the first of their videos.)

(Updated 5 April 2013)

Storytelling apps compared

As a follow-up to my comparison of animated storytelling apps, here is a spreadsheet comparing some other storytelling apps. Apps included in the comparison are:

• SodaSnap Postcards
• SonicPics and SonicPics Lite
• StoryKit
• StoryPatch
• StoryRobe
• StoryMaker

All are obviously intended for the creation of stories, but the final products vary from a single page with images and text, to multipage stories with images, text and audio, to  a video that is basically a narrated slideshow. 

Storytelling with Toontastic

(Review updated May 5, 2011 on release of version 1.1 - see below for additions)
Toontastic (iPad only) is yet another app for creating cartoon stories. Toontastic 1.0 provides more built-in structure to the process of story creation than any of the other apps I've reviewed so far. The company website says it is for the creation of:

an animated story made up of different types of scenes: a Setup, a Conflict, a Challenge, a Climax & a Resolution. Together, these scenes form the Story Arc. Toontastic guides kids through the Story Arc, introducing key concepts and helping them to define the turning points in their stories.

I downloaded it and let my daughter and a friend play with it this weekend. They had previously played with Puppet Pals and really liked it, so I was interested to see what they thought of Toontastic in comparison. One thing they really liked is being able to use their own drawings for backgrounds and characters. They liked that the pre-made characters were editable to some extent - they could change their colors. They also liked that the provided characters had arms and legs that moved. I noticed that characters automatically turned to face the direction in which they are dragged across the screen, whereas in PuppetPals you have to double-tap a character to make it turn around. The girls commented that they thought the characters were easier to manipulate in Toontastic than in PuppetPals. They also liked that you can choose the background music for each scene. (Personally, I would like to be able to choose no music for some projects, but the music choices do at least tie in with the Story Arc concept, helping to reinforce it.) 

The second time the girls played with it, they paid more attention to the Story Arc than they had done the first time. Without any prompting from me, they even figured out that it would be helpful to plan out on paper what their story was and they wrote out much of the script.

Projects in progress can be saved so you can go back and continue to work on them later - a key feature for storytelling apps being used in school, where it may not be possible to complete a story in one class period.  Finished projects can get saved to/shared via the ToonTube website, but saving projects there is optional. Projects uploaded to the ToonTube website can be embedded in another webpage, such as your class webpage or even Facebook. 

Despite the extra support built in to this app to encourage a good story structure, students will still benefit from planning their story out away from the iPad and then having enough time to rehearse and probably record their story more than once. This app is ideal for collaborative work as more than one voice is usually needed for a finished story. Like PuppetPals and Sonic Pics, the final product is a video and not a digital book (as StoryKit's is.) And of course, if you don't have an iPad, you can't play with Toontastic at all :-( 

For other opinions of Toontastic, here is a detailed review of it on the IEAR website, (written January 2011) and another written by Geek Dad at Wired Magazine. 

ETA: Toontastic 1.1 was released on May 4, 2011 and adds some useful features. There are a few more provided characters (or 'Toys' as the Toontastic team calls them), and more provided backgrounds. The drawing tools for creating your own backgrounds and characters have been improved with adjustable thickness brushes, fill and undo functions. Characters and backgrounds that you create are now automatically saved so that you can reuse them in different scenes and stories :-) If you need to get rid of characters that have been added by the kids, just like in iOS with apps, tap and long press a drawn character in the toy box until it starts wiggling.  You'll see a trash icon on the top left of the character, tap that and it will delete the character from the toy box but not from any of the movies it has been used in. Apparently saving to the ToonTube website, or viewing projects there, is now much faster. There is a Toontastic wiki where you can see ideas on how other educators are using Toontastic. 

Digital storytelling with StoryKit

StoryKit is a free app for both the iPod and iPad that allows the reader to create digital stories. When I first downloaded it, I didn't get the point right away and thought it was just another, not very good, ereader because it comes with three books included on its bookshelf. Once I figured out that it is intended to create books as much as to read them, it suddenly became a LOT more interesting!

The first time I used it with students was with a group of 1st graders. They created a book for me on paper first and only once that was finished did we start the process of transferring the book to the iPods. For their books (about animals) the students had drawn pictures. As I already had a large collection of animal photos on my computer, I loaded the relevant ones onto the iPods for the kids to use in their StoryKit books. For the next project I did with StoryKit, my second graders were writing personal narratives and in this case I scanned their hand-drawn images and loaded them onto the iPods. Students can also draw pictures directly in StoryKit, though the quality (certainly on an iPod as opposed to an iPad) tends to be not as good as images kids draw on paper.

All the students VERY quickly got the hang of navigating their way through StoryKit. It was good to see them being critical of their audio recordings, and choosing to re-record and re-record (without any prompting from me) until they were happy with what they heard. Without exception, as soon as they had finished, they wanted to share their stories. They went back to their regular classroom teacher and wanted the whole class to see their story, and they went home and showed their parents the story from my website. In all my years of teaching, I have rarely seen such enthusiasm from students for sharing their writing!

Here is a YouTube video on using StoryKit on an iPad. The creator comments at the end that when she uploads her finished stories to the StoryKit website the sound does not work. I have not found that to be the case.



Here is a sample photo story educator and technology advocate Wes Fryer put together using StoryKit about visiting China. Wes embedded it into his blog page. Here it is on the StoryKit website.

Here is a podcast (over an hour long) that you can download that details a University of Maryland research project using Story Kit to enable families to create digital stories. It includes some good ideas on ways you can use the software.

Things to be aware of about using StoryKit:

• there are definitely some logistics involved in getting images onto the iPods for the students. If you have newer iPods with built-in cameras, (I don't), I suppose you could take photos of the students' hand-drawn images. I run them through the photocopier/scanner which then emails them to me. (As fast as a making a regular photocopy, and much faster than using a 'regular' scanner!) 
• Depending on your tolerance for background noise in the finished product, it may be difficult to find a quiet enough area in school for the audio recording.
• You can add more than one audio clip to each page.
• When students are recording their stories, it is definitely helpful if they have a written version that is not on the iPod to read from because the recording window hides the page where a student may have entered text.
• Typing is still a new skill for most younger kids and can go very slowly. I will admit that, given the luxury of very small groups of students, I have had students type one or two pages in their story and I have helped them finish up.
• The text box can be moved up and down the page, and you can 'pinch' or 'stretch' the text box to resize it somewhat. 
• The spelling/auto-correct feature on the iPods can be helpful, but can also be incredibly frustrating when it repeatedly 'miscorrects' a word.
• If you use the paint tools, make sure not to paint where your text will be. Even if you enter the text first, you will not be able to see it while you are painting. 
• The shared projects are hosted on the childrenslibrary.org website.  There is no way to directly upload a finished story to another website (though of course you can link to the project at childrenslibrary.org.) There is no way to download or save the finished projects to share in any way other than through the website or on the iPod. Compare this to an iMovie which can not only be uploaded to a website but also saved as a DVD. Should the childrenslibrary.org website ever shut down, all the projects published online will vanish :-( On the other hand, free access to the childrenslibrary.org site means that if students create stories on an iPod at home, they have a way to share it without having to have their own website.
• The iPod you create the story on has to be set up to send email so that the story can be shared. 

Finally, if you use StoryKit, you can let the developers know what you think of it right here.