Schoolhouse Review Crew: Mobile Education Tools

 We recently had an opportunity to review our first app.  From Mobile Education Tools, we reviewed Story Builder, an app that is for the iPhone or 4th Generation iTouch.  Story Builder was the winner of the best reading app of 2011 by the Huffington Post.  "Story Builder is designed to help children accomplish the following educational goals: 1) Improve paragraph formation ; 2) Improve integration of ideas; and 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 fun environment for teaching children how to create a narrative.

Story Builder has the following features:

• 3 levels of play
• record feature so students can record their own voice
• simple interface to record narrative
• recorded answers are stitched together to make a complete narrative
• 50 different story lines
• over 500 audio clips of questions to guide narratives
• optional question text and answer introduction reinforcement
• email recorded stories

In order to use this app, you must have an iPhone or the newest iPod Touch (4th Generation)  that has a microphone to be able to record narrative.  The app is rated 4+, is 23.8 MB,  and is available in English only.  Story Builder can be found in the iTunes Store for $5.99. 

Here are a couple of screenshots to give you an idea of how it works.

The children are asked questions about the pictures and record their answers.  After the series of pictures are finished they can hear their answers played back to form a story about the pictures.  There are three levels with one being the easiest and 3 being the most difficult.

Even though my oldest daughter has had an iTouch for a few years, this is the first app I have used with the younger children (8,6,4.)  The app was very easy to download and start using.  The children thought it was really cool that it recorded their voice and they could listen to it.  I thought it was a great, fun way to teach children to think about what is going on in the pictures and giving their answers to create a story.  I loved to hear how the children answered the questions.  Kids can be so creative!

To see what other crew mates had to say click here.

Disclaimer:  As a member of the Schoolhouse Review Crew I received a complimentary download of the Story Builder App for the purpose of writing a fair and honest review.  I received no other compensation.

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