Literacy Apps

The iPad is a versatile tool to support students in literacy, both reading and writing, for so many reasons. First, there are a lot of built-in supports that come pre-installed in the operating system that support students in areas where they might struggle. There are numerous instructions for using these supports in the Tutorial section as well as under the iPad Accessibility section. Secondly, there is a lot of content in the form of Apps to support a variety of learning ages and needs. These will be covered below in the recommended Apps list below which is divided into two general sections: Reading and Writing. Clearly there are a lot of Apps that may fall under Literacy that may not be covered. These may include letter writing, phonemic awareness, and spelling apps.

Reading Apps

Kurzweil 3000 or Firefly (license required)

ClaroPDF/Pro (free/$5.99)

Writing Apps

Kurzweil 3000 or Firefly (license required)

Two of the basic tenets for promoting successful writing include writing for a purpose and writing for an audience. When students are given meaningful ways to write, their writing is often much richer. One of the ways to bring purpose to writing is to allow students to be legitimate authors and create a book.

Book Creator is an app that allows students of all ages to easily and quickly create a book. Although I would target this app towards a primary audience, there is absolutely no reason why students in Secondary schools couldn't use it to create a book of greater sophistication and content. Part of the allure of the app itself is the tactile nature of manipulating content. The app is nicely suited to the iPad platform in that pictures and text can be easily moved from one area to another simply by dragging. The conventions for resizing text or image boxes is identical to many online and iOS apps - simply drag the resize handle of the box.

Book Creator allows students to embellish their work in a basic but effective manner without making the app overly detailed. Students can easily increase font size, change the font type and colour and add background effects as needed. Once the project is complete, students will be amazed at the polished product that was not only easy to produce but a motivational process as well. Books can be exported in a variety of formats and shared or stored on multiple cloud platforms including Dropbox or Google Drive.

Tip: A lesser known feature of the app is that pre-established formats make it quick and easy to create a certain style. For example, using the comic template, students can create a comic style book.

In this day and age when there are so many options for creating digital stories, many of which are free, an app has to be pretty exceptional in order to command such a high price tag. Pictello might just be one of those few exceptions. What makes this app particularly outstanding is both the level of complexity yet at the same time maintaining a level of simplicity that makes it easy for most users to create a story. To facilitate this, the app allows you to write in Wizard or Expert mode depending on one's familiarity with the app. Among the many features are multilingual support, a vast array of voices that can be used to read text aloud, the ability to add a range of media including videos, and built-in accessibility features such as word prediction and auditory feedback to allow users to hear back what they have typed. For many supportive learning classrooms, this is the first and still the standard in apps for creating social stories.

Word prediction is all the rage these days - it is available in many applications and it is even built right into the iOS keyboard. Not too long ago, there was a time when word prediction wasn't yet a household name. While I can't definitely say where it started, I can say with confidence where it was perfected - at a company called Don Johnson, creator of the computer program Co-Writer and which has now been ported to an iOS app. The question that many readers may ask is why would anyone pay so much money for an app when word prediction is free and built into each Apple device. There are a few reasons but the primary reason is the accuracy and flexibility of the word prediction engine. To date, I have yet to find anything that comes close to being as robust as Co-Writer. Many word prediction engines are glorified spell checkers. As long as the typed word is in the ballpark of the actual word, most word prediction engines will suggest the correct word. What differentiates a good word prediction program from a great one is when the attempted spelling of a word doesn't resemble the actual word yet phonetically makes sense. Two examples that you can use are jiraf (giraffe) and lfnt (elephant). Neither starts with the correct letter but both contain the phonemes that correspond with the correct spelling of the word. Co-Writer picks up on this phonetic pattern and correctly suggests the words among other words.

Another powerful tool that comes with Co-Writer is the topic dictionary. This is a feature where words that are predicted are given priority based on the topic that is identified. For example, if New York is chosen as the topic, then words like empire or apple will come up sooner than other words when the corresponding letters of e or a are typed. There are many topics that come with the program but custom topics can be created using the program's powerful topic scraping feature where the program essentially searches the internet for words relating to a topic.

All in all, if word prediction is a beneficial tool, this is an app to consider.

Although iWordQ does not come from Switzerland, I think of it as the Swiss army knife of writing apps. It does a bit of everything and it does it fairly well but it is does not excel either. Here is a rundown of some of the features that this app offers that differentiates it from the pack. First off, the app runs in two modes: writing as well as reading which seems surprising for a writing app. However, when you think more further on this, it would make sense that a good writer listens and reflects on his or her writing to pick up on potential errors. This is one of the areas where iWordQ shines - although the reading voice is synthetic like all other apps, the app is able to chunk phrases together to make the reading sound more natural and therefore easier to comprehend.

Supports within the writing mode include word prediction (which is not as accurate as other apps), auditory feedback (the app reads back what is being written either word by word or sentence by sentence), and customizable abbreviations where users can shorten a longer word or phrase (typing the abbreviation is replaced by the longer word or phrase).

The features in this app are undoubtedly useful but with the improvement of both stock and accessibility features within the iPad operating system, most of what is available in this app could be easily duplicated on the iPad without purchasing an additional app.

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