Melissa Cortese LIS 568 Blog

PuppetMaster is an app that is an animation app that motion captures the action of the student by moving in front of the camera. You can touch the screen as well and it motion captures that too. It can even record their voice as well. Students can take a drawing they made or a photo and make it come to life by making it a puppet by aligning your motion capture with the picture to make it move. This can be useful in library Makerspaces where students can create their own motion capture videos. They can also use the video as virtual storytelling and have media literacy in their motion capture project. What I also like about this app that it was free and extremely easy to use. I took a photo of a doll and motion captured my arms waving around and in the video the doll actually did it! The app was easy to use and a lot easier than it sounded. You can use a variety of free backgrounds the app provides as well and they provide characters you can use. The only catch is that its an iOS App

Nick Jr. Books This app is called Nick Jr. books. What makes this reading app different is that this app features many popular characters such as Dora the Explorer, Paw Patrol and Blaze and the Monster machines. This app is also interactive and children can click on the animations and they move and make sounds. This can make reading more fun and engaging for the child to be able to click on the props in the story and they do something. Children also earn stars for every book they read which can encourage them to keep meeting their reading goals in order to earn more stars. Nick Jr. books also gives children the option to read the books or listen to them as an audiobook. This can be a good way for school librarians can read a story to elementary school children for storytime with an iPad or students can read or listen to it on their own.  The price is the first three books are free and any other books after that are $2.99 each. It is only available on iOS devices. I am a little

Too noisy is an app that I heard of while reading a blog post. This app measures the loudness of the room. This can be good to monitor the behavior of the students in the room. This is best used for an elementary school library as a noise control app. If the app senses it too loud in the room the smiley face will turn to a frown. This can be a good app to use to control the noise of the library if elementary students get too loud. You can even attach it to a monitor and project it on a screen so the whole library can see it. The sensitivity of the app can be adjusted to your preferred level of loudness in the room as well. I tested it out at my storyhour at the library for a few minutes while reading a story because the kids can get quite noisy during that time and they seemed to enjoy it and wanted the lever to stay in the green section. But I don't know how all classes will like this and some librarians don't mind their library being loud. The app is free and you can pay

The app I tested out was Storybuddy 2. Storybuddy 2 would be good for elementary school students in a library setting but out of all the apps I tested I don't think this app is worth it to use. This app is essentially a book creator. I tested this out on my iPad and I created stories using pictures, text and even audio recordings. You can draw pictures right on the screen as well and use themes for each page to style up the book. The end product is a hand made picture book on the app.  The reason I didn't like this app is because the layout was essentially a child friendly version of PowerPoint. I think students would like creating a picture book by themselves and it can inspire creativity in students to have them create a book on their own but you can do the same thing in PowerPoint and there's really no difference. It's only 99 cents as well so not that expensive to get for each student in the class but the entire school it might be pricey and its iOS apple pro

The app I am reviewing is called Swift Playground which is an iOS product from Apple. It's an app that believes anyone can code and its aimed at elementary school students. The app teaches young students to learn the Swift program and how to learn and write code. Lately STEM has been a huge push in school districts and this app can make a great edition to a school library Makerspace. I believe this app should be connected to a STEM unit or to a Makerspace or else it wouldn't make much sense in the context of the school library. What I love about this app is that it doesn't require any background knowledge of coding so this a great app for students to start out with. I recommend third to fourth graders to use this app. The student can code creatures called "bytes" and design their own landscape almost like they are designing a video game. This can get students interested in coding and designing very early in life and its gender neutral so girls and boys c

Storytime by Kindoma The name of the app is Storytime by a company called Kindoma. It allows long distance parents or relatives of a child read them a story over the app. The story appears on the screen along with the video of each of the people using the app. The child can point to something and the other person can see where the child is pointing and they can highlight words as they go along. This can make interacting with books much more fun for the child and provide the long distance relatives a chance to connect with the child.  The price of the app is free and it gives you ten free books to read. If a parent want more books they have to buy each book and the prices vary. For an unlimited access to the catalog of books in the catalog, s ubscription is available for 1 month at $6.99 or for 6 months at $29.99 ($5 per month). A child can use this app by listening to the adult read or doing the reading by his or her self. It can be a fun interactive experience for all the