When I was at SXSWedu last month, I attended a presentation by folks from KinderTown, a company specializing in iOS apps for preschool kids. KinderTown is not a team of developers, instead they bill themselves as “working hard to find the best educational apps for children. Each app we select has been tested and reviewed by educators, parents, and most importantly, children. Not all, or even most of the apps meet our high standards. We take many factors into account including educational value, ease of use, engagement value, design features, artwork, cost, and shelf life.” Their angle is the testing and vetting process and reviews and ratings they provide parents before downloading.
While iTunes has a ton of apps and app developers are a dime a dozen, we all know how frustrating searching and finding quality apps can be and how reviews and ratings can often be misleading or simply too disorganized to be of much help. Yes, “there’s an app for that” and you can “just Google it,” but how much crap (and bias and paid-for placement) do you have to wade through to find real answers and solutions and get to the good stuff? Too much.
So tons of information, an app for everything you could ever imagine (and more), and still not much sense of where to really get what you want and need and find what’s reputable. In terms of educational apps, KinderTown is doing it right for the preschool set. Beyond that, I recommend the work done by the team at The Texas Computer Education Association who have painstakingly listed, categorized, and filtered hundreds of educational apps and even color-coded the downloadable doc so that you can see what is free.
http://www.tcea.org/learn/ipadipod-resources
Enjoy the list and bring on the feedback about your favorite edu-apps!
TCEA-Recommended iPad Apps – Google Docs
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AvFbfb1mWoNwdGlweWtkZkFRS1gzUDMtTUtoTEw0MkE