Apps for Literacy and Learning

Proloquo2Go is an app designed to help teachers and therapists empower kids who have limited or no speech with an alternative way to communicate. It offers natural sounding text-to-speech voices, up-to-date symbols, automatic conjugations, vocabulary of over 7000 items, and ease of use. It uses an adaptable, multi-size grid format to present images and words on “buttons.” Buttons represent different groups of items, actions, “little words,” and more. Students can choose from single words or combine words to make detailed sentences that express their wants, needs, or emotions — almost anything. You can add buttons using your own pictures or images that are meaningful to each user.

Model Me Going Places 2 is a social skills aid designed for students with Asperger syndrome, autism, and developmental delays, but the tutorials could be useful for any student who needs help building social skills. Six sets of photos with narration demonstrate appropriate and expected behaviors at a hairdresser, mall, doctor’s office, playground, grocery store, and restaurant.

Spelling with ABC and Phonics uses entertaining, silly videos to introduce young readers to pattern words and word families by having them match letters to their outlines to spell the words on the list. Each list contains eight words that have the same ending pattern or a matching phonic element such as th, sh or ch sounds.

Planet Lettra is an app for experimenting with word building and hearing what you’ve made. Children arrange a set of letter blocks any way they want and hear what they’ve built. Blocks are designed to guide your child in building the most important sight words for reading fluency and exposure to important letter blends.

The Sight Word Adventure is a fun-filled game where children can learn to recognize, read, and write up to 320 sight words. The game of Hide-and-Seek is the central point of the app because it symbolically explores the cognitive skills necessary to remember sight words such as: visual attention, the morphology of the forest setting (i.e. the letters in a word), active listening, and of course visual memorization.

A versatile mind-mapping tool to help kids visually organize information and ideas. Easily create diagrams, maps, organizers, brainstorms, and text outlines.

Images and prompts inspire kids of all ages to write, with increasing depth and complexity at higher levels. Students can create new prompts using their own images and ideas.