With Apple soon to announce it’s ‘latest creation,’ we have a feeling Apple’s influence on the digital world will burst forward quite a bit this year.

More specifically, the iPhone continues to show incredible upward trends, and signs point to a fantastic 2010.

If we combine our sunny iPhone forecast with the general upward mobile trends (more users, more content, more ad revenue, and, most importantly, more influence on our lives), the clarity of our mission – namely to positively impact the educational use of the iPhone – grows stronger.

We genuinely believe, despite tens of thousands of apps to discuss and millions of current users, that our conversations here at the ikids blog can make a difference, so as we move forward this year, please feel free to comment on posts or let us know better ways to mold the conversation.

Our first new year’s resolution is to get back on track with reviews…more to come soon!

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the ikids blog update

If your kids are like mine, they have been chatting about Santa nonstop for weeks.  I have also been leveraging the power of the nice list to get improved behavior out of my 3 year old

Our blog has fallen off the radar a bit because we have been focused on a Santa contest, and some soon to be released updates to our site.

The Santa Countdown is a FREE iPhone app, a website, a blog, a twitter page, a youtube channel and most importantly it gives you a chance to get on the nice list while winning over $350 in prizes!

The website currently features two games, with a final one on the way. The Santa Countdown app will be re-released either today or tomorrow, updated with two games (and therefore two chances to win prizes!). Grab a copy and go for the prizes, or the nice list…

more contests

The makers of Little Cook (review here) have informed us of a ‘Little Critics’ contest with a chance to win one of three prizes.  Because we so enjoyed their app, we are sharing a link to their contest here.

more Christmas apps

We are soon to have reviews for Night Before Christmas By Louise Grant, and X Mas Crackers.

Non-Christmas reviews are also in the works.  Cheers,

the ikids blog

        

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November has been a busy month for the the ikids blog, even though the blog posts have been few.  We have numerous pending reviews, so if you have requested one please continue to monitor the site. Remember, this site is a labor of love!

More importantly, we are creating a marketing platform for app developers to promote their products. This new tool will also give app users and educators a chance to weigh in on their favorite apps and to continue to improve the educational benefits of the iPhone.

Thank you for your visit and please stay tuned!

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Little Cook is a newly released app, crafted by Aquility. This app looks great, plays well and is definitely worth the purchase.

To start, you appear within a kitchen full of clickable food items. Once you click on one of them, you get to play a game of mixing and matching ingredients to make that item (e.g. a sandwich).

Once you complete your recipe, a wonderfully illustrated girl tries the food and lets you know how it tastes. You can click on the fork/spoon graphic to give her another bite, and after each bite is another opinion on the taste. This section, for me, sets this app apart from most.

Apps that do the bare minimum give redundant and predictable feedback, which takes away from the fluidity of the experience. As a rule, the more canned it feels, the less engaging and educational it will be.

Instead of the easy route, Aquility has given the taste tester a wide range of responses, which I found appropriate for the many bad sandwiches and delicious ice cream sundaes my little guy made (he might have culinary school in his future).

Little Cook follows a quality…recipe:

great images + solid audio + easy usability = your kid engaged and learning.

This will quickly rise to the top of the category, especially at a recession-friendly $0.99!

        

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The same thing that I love about Animal Music is also the same thing that leads me to hesitate a bit in recommending it — the app is incredibly simple. Upon loading the app, you get a single screen with six animals faces floating against a landscape background.

Each animal head corresponds to a note played on a flute-like instrument reminiscent of the sound of Ocarina. Together they form a major pentatonic scale, which means that a toddler can bang away on the app without producing any dissonant intervals. This simplicity does open up the app to the littlest learners, as does the face that the buttons are big and easy to push for fingers that may not yet have adult-level coordination. That said, it’s tough to love the graphics of this app – they just feel like clip art. Without a doubt, there are other apps out there that give you more bang for your buck — but if your kids don’t seem to focus on the graphics of an app and you think that they’d love to play with a super easy-to-use instrument, then Animal Music may be perfect for you. You can get it here if you’re interested.

        

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There are lots of matching games available for kids on the iPhone, and it’s not at all clear why kids would really need more than one. That said, if your kids don’t already have a favorite matching game, Count Racula is worth grabbing — especially this time of year. The app features a standard card-flipping game board, filled with a small army of vampires that need to be matched with their pair.

The user interface is just what you’d hope for and expect – simply touch the cards to flip them over and try to match pairs. There are two modes available within the app — matching numbers to numbers, or matching numbers to objects. Throughout the experience, the aesthetic of the app is true to the spooky theme — both melodies and illustrations deliver on the promise of some ghoulish Halloween fun.

Also worth noting – the app not only helps kids learn to count, but it helps teach them to do so in both Spanish and English by saying the relevant number when you match a pair.

Sound like the perfect Halloween treat for your little monster? You can pick it up from the iTunes store here.

        

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Say goodbye to textbooks and hello to the next-gen mobile tools that will power our children’s education. Increasing access to high-end mobile devices and an explosion of mobile educational software are leading to pilot programs focused on determining the role this new technology should have in the classroom. These pilot programs are already demonstrating significant impact on student learning. Curious about what else lies ahead? Here are four trends driving the death of the chalkboard and the coming mobile education revolution:

Smart phone penetration will hit 82% by 2013
In order for mobile devices to be the future of education, kids need access to devices that are more sophisticated than yesteryear’s Razr. Text-to-screen, in-class polling exercises are a great component of many forward-thinking teachers’ current curricula, but for mobile devices to take center stage in the classroom, better devices need to achieve ubiquity. This is happening — fast. eMarketer recently reported that by 2013, 82% of all mobile devices in use worldwide will be smart phones.

The App Store is producing an explosion of educational mobile content
In little over a year, the iPhone App Store has taken the world of mobile computing by storm — and educational apps have been a huge part of this. This exponential increase in the availability of mobile educational software parallels the improvement of the hardware devices — and is just as critical for mobile education to be a reality. Translation tools, musical instruments, learning games, and mobile books are just the tip of the iceberg. Every day more than 10 new educational kids apps are added to the App Store. Tens of millions of educational apps have already been downloaded. And while this focuses narrowly on the impact of Apple’s iPhone, the broader trend here is clear — others are following the lead of the App Store, and as soon as there are smart phones in everyone’s hand, there will be first-rate mobile educational software to match.

Existing pilots of mobile education are demonstrating success
Preliminary research from both Australia and the US is finding that when using iPod Touches as part of their class activities, school attendance increases, students are more willing to come to school, and they do more homework. Further quantitative research is needed, but it seems obvious that kids will learn more if they are engaged in the process — and cutting-edge mobile devices like the iPod Touch are brilliant at driving engagement.

Mobile devices offer access to the internet in places the traditional web doesn’t reach
In Africa, for example, mobile web penetration is six-times higher than the traditional web. This means that for many people using their mobile devices is their only means of accessing the practically infinite sources of scholarship available online. Similar circumstances hold true in India, where video English lessons are delivered via cell phones to rural schools that can afford neither English teachers nor computers for their students.

What’s all that add up to? More powerful mobile devices, in more people’s hands, powered by a growing digital library of educational software. Together these trends make one thing clear — mobile education is poised to have a significant impact on the way our children learn.

Looking for more information on how the forces driving the embrace of mobile education are already playing out in the real world? Check out this discussion on iPod Touch implementations in schools that is happening on Classroom 2.0.

[Editor's Note: We originally published this on ezinearticles.com, but have shared it here for the large chunk of our audience that may not have seen it there. We still believe in the thinking.]

        

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Currently, if you visit the App Store on your computer you will see an icon for “Apps for Toddlers” which directs you to Apple’s top 10 essential toddler apps:

• Monkey Preschool Lunchbox (read a review)
• Peekaboo Barn (read a review)
• Old MacDonald
• Toddler Teasers Quizzing
• Dora Saves the Crystal Kingdom
• Disney Fairies Fly
• Itsy Bitsy Spider
• Shape Builder (read a review)
• Preschool Adventure
• Curious George Coloring Book

There are certainly several good ones left out but this is a pretty solid list.  Thoughts?

        

(4 votes, average: 4.75 out of 5)

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Kid Book is a simple, well illustrated app with audio to match.  It has some promise and some room for enhancements.

When you dive into the app you are shown an animal inside a colored shape.  Each time you tap the phone you get a new audio piece (first the animal sound, then the animal name, then the shape and finally the color of the shape…lather rinse repeat). To advance you simply click the left or right arrow at the bottom of the screen, and you get a new set of items.

This app, like many others does most of the basics well but fails to give kids a reason to keep playing. There is certainly a choose-your-adventure argument to be made for letting kids float through an app.  Based on my kids use of the apps, however, it is also really important to give kids something to look forward to or they will neither play for long nor return to the app.

Monkey Preschool Lunchbox is just one of several apps that has figured this trick out (review here).  After a few rounds of the game, kids get to choose a sticker.  Other apps I’ve seen use scoring or unlock features as kids successfully navigate through them, giving kids a sense of accomplishment and motivation to go forward.

Overall, the foundation laid for Kid Book is very strong, and I believe with some rethinking around the purpose of the app, it could be tweaked to become a fan (and maybe even Apple) favorite! Keep your eye on Stolen Lunch for more apps.

        

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ABC Animals has a familiar tale: turn learning the ABC’s into a flash card experience that is ripe with illustrations and audio to match.

And yet the makers of the app, Critical Matter Inc, have thrown their own twist on the story.  Behind each card they have placed instructions for kids to draw letters.  As kids follow the helpful instructions and trace the letters, their little fingers are greeted with pink ink (digital of course) that they can splatter across the canvas.

The draw-the-letters feature of the app is fun and unique, but is also the source of my one complaint.  The app opens immediately on the flash cards, and does not offer instructions on how to get to and from the drawing feature.

When I first tried the app I accidentally found my way to the back of a card, began to draw and then stumbled back to the front of the card.  It took a minute to realize a double tap flipped the cards back and forth.  Sounds like a silly complaint but my near 3 year-old did not find it any more intuitive.

Zander did try out the app a bit and liked the illustrations, the audio and the most of all the drawing.  In short, my little guy liked the app. I believe it is an update or two away from showing its full potential…A pretty app, and a unique app.  Kudos to Critical Matter Inc.

        

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