Melissa Cortese LIS 568 Blog

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...

Meistertask is a task management program app for iOs and android and its completely free. Meistertask is a collaboration tool and task list that allows students and teachers to share tasks with one another pertaining to a project. Notifications are sent if a task needs to be completed or is already complete. This is a great tool to keep a group on task and for a teacher to send them tasks one by one. A current dashboard looks like this:   There are open tasks to do, in progress tasks, review tasks, completed task and future ideas. You can change the bars too to customize it how you wish. I tried this app out for myself and while I liked it I wish I had a classroom of students I can test it out with. Trying this app out by myself didn't seem like I got the full experience of it because you need a group of people to make this app work. But I ended up learning fairly quickly how to plan a task, time a task and schedule a task to be done. The dashboard is set up fairly easy to use...