Digital Picture Book App: Speakaboos Reading App

Title: Speakaboos Reading App: Stories and Songs for Kids
Publisher: Conscious Content Media LLC, 2016

This application was called "Speakaboos" which has over 200 stories and songs available to children to read electronically. This app allows children to have access to this many stories to choose from - literally it's like a library in their own two hands. I had so much fun flipping through the variety of stories, topics, and themes available to me. The application includes everything from fairy tales, fables, nursery rhymes, Thomas the Train, Sid the Science Kid, Sesame Street songs, stories organized by topic like soccer, science, music, etc. Overall I loved this application and would definitely use it in the classroom. The age range is 2-6 and I would prefer to be in a higher aged classroom, so I do hope they have one like this available for older students. It is such a neat concept and the best part is you can do a free trail to try!!

I read a couple different stores, but one of the ones I liked the best was "The Very Fairy Princess." It was super neat because it was almost as if you were watching a movie with subtitles. I would just need to make sure the children are actually looking at the words while they are watching the pictures move around. However, it is done well because they show the words at the bottom of the screen and they highlight the word that is being spoken. I love movies, so for me, this would have been a great way to get me more involved with reading. Reading is really fun when done this way, and I think children/students would agree!!

The downside to this app is you do have to pay a fee per month to use it. The plus side is you have access to over 200 stories that the children can use and read. The only problem I had while watching and reading some of the stories was that they were super slow to load. This could cause children to get distracted from the story and not want to finish reading. When reading a book in hand, you can go at your own pace, so page loading is not an issue. I don't know if it's because I was doing the free trial that it was slow, but they definitely need to fix this aspect of the app if I were to actually buy it.