Apps for Literacy and Learning

Write My Name helps kids practice lower- and uppercase letter formation by following an arrow and audio cues. Once finished, a simple animation reinforces the letter or word traced. Writers can capture their work on the photo roll and can see how many words or letters they’ve completed. There are 112 preloaded sight words that a kid can trace in all uppercase or all lowercase letters. A voice says each letter and word as a kid completes them. Parents and kids can add their own words along with picture or audio clues.

Choiceworks Calendar provides a visual learning tool that helps kids better understand and organize their time. With an easy-to-use interface that provides 275 preloaded images and audio descriptions of activities that can be repeated from day to day, Choiceworks Calendar can count down days toward a special event or keep track of activities that should occur every day, like eating breakfast, brushing teeth, or going to school. It was created to help kids with a higher level of anxiety toward transition and may be especially useful for kids with executive function issues such as attention deficits or inflexible/rigid thinking.

Choiceworks provides a platform for kids who need help with executive functioning to explore topics such as schedules, waiting, and feelings using pictures, checklists, storyboards, and more. It comes loaded with one board for each topic but is infinitely customizable.

EpicWin is an app that puts the adventure back into your life. It’s a streamlined to-do list, to quickly note down all your everyday tasks, but with a role-playing spin. So rather than just ticking off your chores and reminders, completing each one earns you points to improve and develop your character in an ongoing quest to improve stats, gain riches, and level-up.

This is an app that spells words for users. Simply tap the microphone and state the word you wish spelled, and the app puts the word on screen in both capital letters and lowercase letters. The app also offers a variety of special fronts for dyslexia/dysgraphia and accurate speech recognition in multiple languages.

An excellent tool for creating visual and auditory apps for any child. Its simple, multisensory interface has great potential for use with kids with developmental or learning disabilities; anxiety or attention issues; language, hearing, or processing difficulties; or who may be learning English as a second language. Parents will develop schedules appropriate for their kids using text, pictures, audio clips, and videos. The schedules can be presented in five formats, each with a different way for a kid to check items completed and move on to the next. “Choice boards” let kids indicate a preference from the choices, such as a reward for tasks completed.

Voice Dream Reader is a text-to-speech app that can read content in a variety of voices from a variety of sources. It’s highly customizable, from reading speed to voice to font and text size. Some voices require in-app purchases ranging from $1.99 to $2.99 each, but a few are included free with the app. Kids can connect their Google Drive, Dropbox, and Evernote accounts to the app to access documents saved there.

Text-to-speech app and browser extension unlocks the written word for all kids, including those with print or processing disorders. With the Talk&Type feature, students can dictate their writing.

Learning Ally Audiobook Reader pairs with a subscription-based program for kids with visual impairments or dyslexia, and users must qualify before subscribing. Text and background colors can be adjusted by preference, rate of reading can be altered, and highlighted text can be set to match a rate that best fits a kid’s reading ability.