Interactive Story App!

Submitted 9 years ago

Community Review for Storypanda Books -- Read, Create, Share Kids Stories

Madeline A.
Madeline A.
My Rating
Pedagogy
Supports

My Take

Overall I like this app. It gives the students the chance to create their own writing piece and share it with the class. It does have limits on the characters, graphics, etc so after awhile it may become boring and lame to the students. I would definitely suggest it to create a couple of stories but would look for an alternate to create more stories.

How I Use It

In the younger grades students need to learn the basics of a story. This app helps students learn and use the basic elements to create their own story. I like how it allows the students to be creative and create their own finished master piece. It's a nice way to get the students interested in writing but also helps to teach and reinforce the elements that make a good story. The younger students love to use it because it allows them to be in charge of their writing.

More community reviews for Storypanda Books -- Read, Create, Share Kids Stories

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Chad S.
Chad S. Perris High School Perris, CA
June 21, 2014

Great potential but needs some tweaking .

StoryPanda for the iPad comes with one free story. There are three other stories that are available for purchase for $2.99, but honestly they don't look visually appealing at first glance. The story is appropriate for 5-8 year olds and provides options for readers to choose their own adventure. The story is about 10 one-sentence pages long. You can change genders of the characters, but that's about it. You have 3 backgrounds to choose from. After you create your story, you're given the option to share your story via Facebook, Twitter, or email. When I tested this feature, it did not work: the link would send you to a broken web page. Overall, this is an app that could have been good but fails to deliver at many levels.
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Michael G.
Michael G. Hartford, CT
May 5, 2014

This has potential, but in-app purchases and lack of options limit its usefulness

Overall, I find this app hard to recommend for classroom use for two major reasons - firstly, as noted in the official review, the app lacks audio prompts or instructions, and the ability to modify text and characters is not immediately obvious. Secondly, the in-app purchases are a major turn-off. The app comes with one free story, and requires subsequent stories to be purchased individually, which becomes very expensive. I am not convinced that this app is worth spending money on, which unfortunately limits its practical application in the classroom. I am also curious as to why the app encourages edited stories to be shared via Facebook and Twitter, considering its target audience is very young children. Not all teachers (or parents) are comfortable with the use of social media at this young age, although it is possibly quite reasonable to share a class edited book via a class Twitter account. This would be up to the classroom teacher. Overall, the limited editing capacity and requirement for in-app purchases could make this a difficult (and very expensive) app for widespread student use, although teachers may find it useful for teacher-directed small group / whole-class activities, depending on the lesson purpose.
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