WHAT: Smarty Ears App Review
NAME: READING COMPREHENSION CAMP
CURRENT LISTING PRICE: $19.99
_____________________________________________________________
Blue the hat bat yesterday house.
Were you able to read every word listed above? I bet.
Did the whole sentence make sense?
Probably not! The nonsense
sentence above is a way to demonstrate that words can be read, but not
comprehended. Words misunderstood or put
in the wrong order = confusion! The best thing would be to be able to
understand what is read. That is what
reading comprehension is. That is why working on reading comprehension is
important and why I was excited for the opportunity to try this new Smarty Ears
Reading Comprehension App out with my speech and language students this week
during therapy.
Several students that I see at the therapy clinic are working on increasing
their reading skills. We focus on
phonemic awareness development, vocabulary advancement, sight word
memorization, reading fluency, and of course, their reading comprehension to
see if they understand what they have read.
It is my ultimate wish that these beautiful children will go on to
acquire a love for reading that will carry over into the rest of their
lives. How great it would be if I could
say that I have helped even one of these children overcome their fear of reading and
ultimately gave them a love for reading that helped them to enjoy recreational
reading and also made them into better students!
READING COMPREHENSION CAMP APP HOW TO GUIDE:
1)
Press read and import a player in from the Therapy Report Center (a separate app that allows all of your
student data from all of the Smarty Ears apps to be organized in one place), OR
go to the add a reader.
2)
After selecting a reader,
click choose a story button.
3)
Select the story and
level. The stories are presented in
levels 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Level one stories were made for 2nd
and 3rd graders, and level 5 was designed for 6th to 7th
graders.
4)
Click settings if you would like the colorful picture that goes with the
story to be large or small and if you would like to change the font size.
5)
Press the play button if you would like to hear
the story read.
6)
Press the record button if you would like to
record voice while the story is read aloud.
7)
Press the quiz button when you are ready for the
quiz.
8)
Choose between 12
different types of questions to be asked or choose all of them. The different types are: all, who, what, where, when, why, how, inferences, cause and effect,
compare and contrast, sequencing, vocabulary/context clues.
9)
Press start quiz and answer the quiz questions. Select hint button to see part of the text
highlighted that contains the answer to the question, select check to see if the answer given was
correct. A green check will come if the
answer was correct. If the answer
checked was incorrect, the answer will be taken away.
10) Additional cool feature: The ability to record and write your own story, upload your own picture, and develop your own comprehension questions.
CONS:
- My student reader
commented that he found some of the names of the characters to be hard to read
and to understand. He said this about
both stories that he read. For example, “Patricia”
is not a name that he had read before and reading unfamiliar words really throws him off.
- The quiz section
contains a small print size that is hard to read in comparison to the story.
- Only one picture is provided
for each story.
- I was hoping that the fun
camp theme would be brought into the stories, but I did not see it.
PROS:
+ A large
variety of students at varying levels can use this app (2nd grade to
7th).
+ One to four
students can read and be quizzed on the same story at the same time. This is a very nice group therapy feature.
+ A nice variety of stories are provided. Most stories are fun, light-hearted and have
some humor.
+ The hint
feature during the quiz phase is very nice for encouraging the student to still
try to find his/or her answer.
+ The ability
to make your own stories is a wonderful tool for making a story more specific
to the child’s life or needs.
+ The play
back feature is a wonderful tool for helping to increase fluency skills and
reading comprehension as it gives the child a chance to re-trace the story
contents one more time.
+ The read the
story feature offers clearly read stories with inflection in the reader voices
at appropriate times, e.g., increased pitch for questions, increase loudness to
show excitement.
+ A wide
variety of comprehension questions and the ability to choose which kinds are
asked is a terrific tool as I can target a specific goal that way.
+ The ability
to increase the font size is very helpful for my younger readers.
+ The ability
to have the results emailed, printed or sent to the Therapy Report Center is
very helpful for keeping track of individual student performance.
WOULD I BUY THIS APP?
I would definitely
buy this app. I was missing out on a
good reading comprehension app and this one will be so nice to have now! Having it will reduce my need to track down,
and print out age level equivalent stories for each and every child that I
see. I love the cute stories, the
colorful pictures, and the recoding ability of the app, the data collecting
feature, and the detailed way it quizzes the students to assess for their
understanding of each story.
Technology is fun and is making my job easier!
Love and best wishes, Manda Riebel, MA-CCC-SLP
