flickr/Sean Dreilinger

If you’re a parent or educator thinking of purchasing some apps this holiday season, you may decide to consult one of a growing number of lists and websites highlighting educational apps for young children. It makes sense to consult the reviews: With thousands of educational apps filtering into the market, it’s increasingly difficult to wade through and find high-quality resources.

But do you know who is behind those lists? Are you confident the reviewers have selected the best apps for children, let alone for a child’s learning?

To help, we’ve conducted interviews with founders and developers at some well-known review sites (listed below in alphabetical order) that live, eat, and breathe apps and other ed tech products. This is by no means a complete list of all the resources out there, but we wanted to get a sense of how reviewers choose which apps make the cut. Like the apps themselves, these review sites vary in audience, funding, and philosophy, but they all share the common goal of making the marketplace a little more manageable.

Balefire Labs

Karen Mahon, founder of Balefire Labs, spent more than 20 years in the ed tech field as an educational psychologist and trained instructional designer. As the market exploded, she said she couldn’t find an easy way to compare apps using science-based standards.

Balefire Labs was launched as a consumer report–style service to compare apps and see what each one contains. Each app is rated on 12 criteria stemming from peer-reviewed research on the effects of interactive features built into educational technology. For example, the service shows which apps include error remediation, adaptable difficulty, or clearly-stated learning objectives. Twenty percent of apps are checked by two reviewers to ensure they’re staying consistent on each criteria point.

This post is part of Seeding Reading, an series of articles and analysis by New America’s Ed Policy Program and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. See also the Learning Tech section of EdCentral.org and the JGCC blog.

It’s tough to get a high score on Balefire Labs. Of the approximately 3,300 reviews posted on the site, only 10 percent have received an A or B grade.

But Mahon stresses the letter grade isn’t the most beneficial part of the review. Rather, it’s the ability to compare on a giant chart which apps offer specific research-based learning tools like progress reports or mastery-based instruction.

The team uses a number of methods to find apps, including searching what’s new in the app stores and in Top 100 lists—although Mahon has found that an app’s being on the Top 100 list is “pretty much meaningless” in terms of instructional quality.

The site is funded by subscriptions starting at $3.99 per month, which Mahon said is a way to avoid taking money from developers for the bulk of reviews. However, developers can pay a $250 fee to have their product reviewed and to receive feedback reports on how to improve. The site is also funded by professional development for teachers and other consulting services.

“Sixty-five percent of all of our apps that we review are free. Only 35 percent are fee-based,” Mahon said. “That’s intentional on our part. We’re not trying to get [parents and teachers] to spend more money on apps. We’re trying to get them to spend more wisely.”

Children’s Technology Review

The ed tech field looked very different in 1993 when Warren Buckleitner started the Children’s Technology Review. But the site and service has adapted alongside the industry, writing more than 11,000 reviews along the way and publishing them in monthly issues. This year, it launched the CTREX database of all its reviews with searchable tags and filters.

A four-person in-house staff scores apps using a detailed rating criteria that’s standardized for consistency and occasionally cross-checked by reviewers. That consistency and cross-checking ensures that if you compare two very similar products, the one with a slightly higher rating is, in fact, going to be just slightly better.

All reviews are written from the viewpoint of a “picky teacher”—or a teacher who’s skeptical of public relations jargon and loves tools that foster active learning.

“I call myself a magic hunter,” Buckleitner said of the rare app that scores a home run. “I’m looking for good pedagogy and innovation. And I really like to see technology being harnessed for the benefit of teaching.” Buckleitner started his career as a elementary school teacher in Michigan and originally created Children’s Technology Review as a thesis project while pursuing his master’s degree in human development. He later earned his PhD in educational psychology from Michigan State University.

The site is funded by subscriptions to the service, which start at $8 per month. And although Buckleitner said it’s impossible for any service to be completely bias free, a subscription fee means the site has no financial ties with developers or publishers.

Buckleitner added a tip for anyone on the hunt for a go-to review site: Pick an app you’re already very familiar with and check how different sites review it to see the different approaches and emphases.

Common Sense Media’s Best Apps and Games

Common Sense Media, a national nonprofit known for its work in helping parents navigate the sticky digital landscape, has two sites that sort and highlight apps. One is Graphite, the classroom-focused tool we describe below. The other is the “Best Apps and Games” section of Common Sense Media’s website, which is designed primarily for parents. It presents multiple ways to browse or search for apps: by a child’s age, by type of device, by subject (math, science, etc) and by skill (such as problem-solving or creativity). The site also compiles “best of” lists, such as “Best Roadtrip Apps,” or “Best Puzzle Apps for Kids.”

In the same way that Common Sense Media rates movies and video games, apps are rated according to various dimensions. Reviewers are staff members at Common Sense Media, led by an editor with background in education. They review apps to determine whether the app is appropriate for certain ages. They use a red “off” icon to signal when something may be inappropriate for, say, a 5 year old, and a yellow “pause” button to signal that parents may want to be cautious. The site also uses a rating system to identify apps along a five-point learning scale, with a 5 signaling that an app is “really engaging” and has an “excellent learning approach,” to a 1 meaning that the app is “not recommended for learning.”

Parents and kids are also invited to review apps, and often the parent reviews spotlight dramatically different viewpoints, with one parent effusive in her love of an app and the next complaining that the app was boring her children and not worth the money. (The kids’ reviews can be comical, such as the one-star review for Elmo Potty Time from someone who gave it a red “off” icon for 17-year-olds.)

The site displays no ads. As a nonprofit organization, Common Sense Media’s funding comes from individual donors, as well as a variety of foundations and other organizations.

Digital Storytime

Carisa Kluver and Marc Kluver cofounded Digital Storytime in 2010 to help fellow parents and educators discover picture books for iPads and promote early literacy. Carisa, who reviews and rates the stories herself, has a background as a school counselor, health educator, and researcher in child and maternal health.

Each review covers the general plot, any necessary context about the author, and the reviewer’s general takeaways and impressions. But the site also displays how well an app measured up across nine rating categories. For example, are the e-book’s interactive features well integrated into the story? Or do they interfere with reading comprehension? How’s the audio quality? Is the book’s content appropriate and not too overstimulating for bedtime reading?

Other guest reviews, which include text but not a rating, come from other sites and blogs around the web that Digital Storytime reposts with permission. To date, there are over 970 reviews up on the site.

Digital Storytime is funded by ads that are all run through third parties like Google Ads to avoid conflicts of interest. Kluver never has direct contact with advertisers. Kluver also writes a blog called the Digital Media Dietthat covers digital media, kids, and technology.

Graphite

Common Sense Media launched the free website Graphite last year. Jeff Knutson, senior editor of education reviews, said the two-part review system was designed to give teachers and parents “the best of both worlds.”

A product’s first “learning review” is written by a team of educators who are coordinated by the in-house editors at Graphite. The educators, many of whom are National Board Certified in a variety of fields, are trained on a set of standards that examine a product’s engagement, pedagogy, support for teachers, and feedback.

Hovering right beneath the learning review is the “teacher review,” a crowd-sourced review that averages feedback from teachers. The lively “field note” section details teachers’ firsthand experience using the product in classrooms.

In other words, if the “learning review” is like a restaurant review from food critics, the “teacher review” is like Yelp.

Knutson said Graphite takes a “whole picture” approach, including the nitty-gritty app details and tools to help teachers integrate the apps into the classroom. For example, its App Flows feature helps teachers visualize how a tool could fit into a lesson, whereas its Common Core Explorer helps teachers match reviews with specific standards.

“[All parts] of the site are intended to work together,” Knutson said. “It should really give teachers a wide idea about how to use these tools in the classroom.”

So far, Graphite holds approximately 1,700 educational app, website, and game reviews. Graphite is supported by the SCE Foundation and a personal investment from Bill Gates.

Moms with Apps

Another source of information is Moms with Apps. Founded by four mothers who were developing family-friendly apps and connected over social media in 2009, the site now features a robust community of developers committed to creating apps that protect kids’ privacy. Moms with Apps recently released the results of a survey of more than 400 parents about how they find apps for their children: while 96 percent of respondents report that their kids have benefited from using apps, nearly half (49 percent) said the process of finding good apps is “moderately” to “very hard.”

The Moms with Apps site allows the developer members to provide their own descriptions, and provides additional insight about what’s inside the app. The site enables parents to filter by age range, device, subject, and other app characteristics, including the ability to play without an Internet connection, whether there are in-app purchases, or ads. The “What’s Inside” sidebar that accompanies each description provides further information, such as whether the app collects information or connects to social networks.

The site also features developer profiles so parents can learn more about the people who are creating these apps.

Parents’ Choice Foundation

In 1978, educator, mother and children’s book author Diana Huss Green published the first issue of Parents’ Choice. With the aim of guiding parents to books and toys that encourage a love of learning, the publication eventually attracted reviewers from a variety of fields.

Today, Green’s daughter Claire S. Green is the president of the foundation that’s now the country’s oldest non-profit guide for children’s media and toys. A core team of five, plus a number of reviewers with specialized experience, use the same guiding principles to rate educational technology products that were used to review Legos and building blocks.

Products that receive a Parent’s Choice Award go through a multi-tiered evaluation process. Companies submit their products along with a processing fee that varies depending on the type of product being reviewed (the fee is $250 for apps.) Then the Parent’s Choice committee considers how that product helps a child grow “socially, intellectually, emotionally, ethically, physically,” according to their website. The judges also weigh factors like cost, originality, and play value.

Only about 1 in 5 products submitted to the Parent’s Choice Awards receive recognition in any of the six award levels.

Teachers With Apps

Educators Jayne Clare and Anne Rachel founded Teachers With Apps in 2010 after creating their own reading app, ABC Shakedown Plus, only to see it drowned out by apps they didn’t consider high quality. Today the blog is updated constantly, sometimes several times a day.

“One of the things that makes us unique is we field test all the apps with real students,” Clare, who now runs the site, said in a recent video interview with an app developer. She retired last June after teaching special education for the last 30 years across preschool to eighth grade. “We don’t just cut and paste from the iTunes store. We don’t just play a game ourselves and write a review. We feel that you don’t know the magic of an app until you put it in the hands of a child.”

Teachers With Apps’ reviews cover the general experience of using the app. The site also publishes reviews from a team that includes a speech pathologist, an occupational therapist, primary and secondary teachers, and a few college level professors who field-test apps and write the reviews.

The site is funded by ads that, Clare says, are only sold if they “respect the developer’s product.” And, if you buy an app using the link on the site, Teachers With Apps receives a small percentage of the sale.

“You’re only going to be on our site if you’re high quality and educational,” Clare said in the video interview. In other words, there are no poor ratings on the site—it only features products the team would recommend.

Kathleen Costanza is a writer and editor in Berkeley, CA. She covers education and digital media and learning for HiredPen Inc.

Reprinted with permission from The Guardian.

With Christmas holidays round the corner, many parents are considering the pros and cons of digital books. Storyapps are a hybrid of books, short films and digital games. In the Nosy Crow Cinderella app for example, children do not just hear and read the story. They can dress Cinderella’s stepsisters in their ball clothing, help Cinderella tidy up plates in the kitchen and even insert their “selfie” in one of the magic mirrors.

Flickr / Wayan Vota

Many storybook apps claim to support children’s budding literacy. The Nosy Crow app received rave reviews and several prestigious awards. Yet ongoing research warns that the very interactive features that make apps so exciting may actually disrupt children’s ability to learn from them.

Two recent studies at Royal Holloway University show that with traditional print picture books, learning is facilitated by simple, non-manipulatable stories with realistic illustrations. When books have features that can be manipulated, children are less able to follow the storyline and focus instead on the various features they can play with. Flaps, for example, such as opening a window in a print book, can create a form of interaction that is great for capturing children’s attention.

However, to gain a deeper understanding, children need to appreciate the flow of a narrative and gradually learn that there is a sequence to events, sentences, words and indeed letters that afford meaning and coherence. High-quality children’s books are characterised by rich vocabulary and grammatically complex sentences. If we take children’s attention away from such rich language stimulations and replace them with a fancy game instead, children are unlikely to benefit from repeated exposure to high-level text and simply spend that time playing the game.

Parental or peer support is also critical when children are learning to read from print books and this may be less available when children interact with storyapps. In 2012, researchers explored the differences between reading styles when parents and children read a print book as compared to a story presented on a children’s touch-sensitive electronic console book. The more electronic features there were in the book, the less parents engaged in supportive reading styles and the lower the children’s overall story comprehension.

This body of research seems to contradict the claims made by many storyapp producers. But we need to ask whether we want storyapps to educate or entertain or indeed both, ie edutain children. Just as print books fulfil purposes beyond education, so do storybook apps. To fully understand their value, we need to evaluate storyapps not only in terms of their potential to teach language and literacy skills, but also in terms of their potential to attract young readers to stories and to nurture readers’ identities.

We know from observational studies that parents and children have a great time when interacting with storyapps, with a lot of fun and bonding as a family. Many storyapps offer scaffolding for the emerging reader (eg highlighting the text when each word is read aloud) or let the child choose independently how to advance the story (eg by choosing alternative story endings). This is great for cultivating children’s independent reading ability and can support learning.

Research with print books shows that for specific groups of children, for instance for children with language impairments, books that can be manipulated to work better for learning than the ones without interactive features. Some basic customisation features (such as enlarging the text or changing the background colour) make reading easier for those who are not confident. Similarly, for children with attention difficulties, feedback embedded in apps helps capture their attention and improve attitudes about reading.

A particularly accomplished feature in many storyapps is the ability to customise and personalise the story to tailor the reading to the child’s needs and interests. Personalising digital stories means that storybooks can enrich relationships that already exist. Family members can be various story characters, Daddy can be Superman, children and parents can write and illustrate stories together.

Personalisation is especially useful for children with special needs. For example, for children with severe learning difficulties, the ability to personalise the digital story can provide a unique opportunity to share their feelings with others in the classroom. Digital interactive books can also be changed for different markets more easily than print books and therefore might better address the problem of diversity in children’s books than print media.

For each child, parents and teachers need to decide the appropriateness of any story, the context of use and the platform it is delivered on. They also need to bear in mind that no matter how well-designed and interactive the storyapp is, children still need adults and other peers to share the story experience with. This old truth applies to children’s interaction with TV, digital games or storybooks. Their hybridisation in storyapps has intensified its relevance for the new generation.

Dr. Natalia Kucirkova researches innovative ways of supporting shared book reading and the role of personalisation in early years. Natalia’s doctoral research inspired the development of the Our Story tablet/smartphone app. You can follow her work via http://open.academia.edu/NataliaKucirkova or Twitter @NKucirkova.

The fourth National STEM Video Game Challenge is well underway this year, with students from middle school and high school programs across the country creating their own video games. We can’t wait to see the results of their hard work as the submissions begin rolling in—we’ve always been blown away by their creativity!

Game design professionals will present hands-on workshops for youth and staff museum and library professionals across the country with the generous support of our national community program sponsor, the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

We’re kicking off the series of workshops this Saturday, December 13, 2014 at 1 p.m. at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Lillian Marrero Branch. The library recently received an IMLS National Leadership Grant for their Maker Jawn initiative to support STEM programming to multi-generational audiences, and the STEM Challenge workshop will fuel the momentum for the year to come.

The first 14 workshops have been confirmed at the following locations and times:

• December 13, 2014, 1-4pm: Free Library of Philadelphia, Lillian Marrero Branch, Philadelphia, PA
• December 20, 2014, 1-4pm: Science Museum of Virginia, Richmond, VA
• January 3, 2015, 1-4pm: Pima County Public Library, Tucson, AZ
• January 14, 2015, 4-7pm: City of New Braunfels Public Library, New Braunfels, TX
• January 24, 2015, 10am-2pm: Museum of History & Industry, Seattle, WA
• January 25, 2015, 12-4pm: Port Townsend Public Library, Port Townsend, WA
• January 26, 2015, 10am-1pm: Port Townsend Public Library, Port Townsend, WA
• February 5, 2015, 6-8:30 pm: Billings Public Library, Teen Game Design Workshop, Billings, MT
• February 6, 2015, 1-3:30 pm: Billings Public Library, Librarian Workshop, Billings, MT
• February 7, 2015, 1-3:30 pm: Billings Public Library, Librarian Workshop, Billings, MT
• February 7, 2015, 1-4pm: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Teen Workshop, New York, NY
• March 6, 2015, 9am-2pm: SciTech Days, Carnegie Science Center, Pittsburgh, PA
• March 7, 2015, 1-4pm: Carnegie Science Center, Teen Workshop, Pittsburgh, PA
• March 7, 2015: Carnegie Science Center, Teacher Workshop, Pittsburgh, PA

We’ll be posting more workshops as dates are confirmed on the stemchallenge.org website — check the homepage often! The site also features resources and tips to help students and mentors get started, so dig in and start learning about the process of creating successful games.

This year’s STEM Challenge will be accepting entries from youth in grades 5- 12 through February 25, 2015. Learn more about the Challenge rules and submission guidelines on the website.

On December 10, 2014, President Obama hosted the White House Summit on Early Education. Michael Levine was invited to participate in a panel on Equity and Excellence in the Earliest Years hosted by Megan Smith, Chief Technology Officer of the United States and Shannon Rudisill, Director of the Office of Child Care. The following are his remarks:

Good afternoon colleagues, I’m Michael Levine and I run the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.  The Workshop—now over four decades old is perhaps the world’s best known educational media organization, reaching about 150 million children in 150 countries.  Its mission is—most of you know—devoted to driving innovation in early learning with media and technology.  Recent research, including work that the Center and our colleagues at New America have underway, is demonstrating that there is great untapped potential in properly deploying new technologies to modernize early leaning programs.   Unfortunately to date, we—as a field—have been a little bit stuck.  Worried about the distractions provided by a ubiquitous media culture in which too many children already do not get the adult nurturing and powerful supports they need, many in our field worry that educators and parents are living in something like the digital wild west.  Can we help them navigate better?   My view is: Yes, we can. But what do you think? Let me provoke this discussion by teeing up four critical issues for building a digital age architecture for America’s young children.  I’ll finish with a challenge for our group.

Issue 1: Building infrastructure/Teacher prep—The early learning field is woefully unprepared to ‘modernize’ our practices.  A recent task force that I co-chaired with Linda Darling-Hammond at Stanford studied the physical and human infrastructure for technology access and examined the workforce professional support needs of our early educators.  We found that too few early learning centers have adequate broadband access, most teachers have never been exposed to new modes of integrating technology into their classrooms, and the lack of tech-enabled linkages to connect home and school is an opportunity lost.

Issue 2: Modern expectations for success—While as a field we know quite a bit about the components of a high quality early learning program, we haven’t yet defined a balanced set of expectations for young children who are growing up in a networked, global community. So we need to decide: what should a digitally competent 8-year-old know and be able to do?

Issue 3:  Equity— Research from Susan Neuman and others indicates that there is a disturbing new equity gap evolving between low-income children and their more advantaged peers on technological fluency. As we better define expectations for every young child in a digital age, how will these expectations drive investments in equity? Are we in danger of setting the bar too low—focusing on closing word gaps, but missing the full potential of every child?

Issue 4: Innovation—My view: the field needs a whole new think about innovation—our signature programs resemble the generation of initiatives that were invented around the time that SS and Head Start debuted in 1969, and they may not be meeting the realities and needs of today’s families.  Can tech be a driver for new designs—especially for the increasingly diverse families we are serving today?

So my provocation is we must reframe two digital age “E’s”: our expectations and commitment to equity and two “I’s:  attend to our physical and human infrastructure, and drive a new innovation vision.

Here’s my challenge: We have heard the President and his cabinet announce exciting new programs today that are timely and sorely needed.  But none directly focused on leveraging the potential of technology as a potential game changer!  So I close with two questions: 1) how can we integrate what we know about the effective uses of tech to help drive the partnerships announced today and other innovative solutions to scale with a kind of  multiplier effect; and 2) starting right now, how can we promote the next generation of technological innovations that the President, Congress, the states, practitioners and the private sector will embrace as worthy of new investments—hopefully in the near future?

I look forward to our discussion.

Flickr/William Beem

Today, President Obama is hosting the White House Summit on Early Childhood Education, with a coalition of philanthropic, business, education, advocates, and elected officials committed to expanding access to high-quality early education.

The Cooney Center’s Founding Director Michael Levine will deliver remarks on Equity and Excellence in the Earliest Years at a panel hosted by Megan Smith, Chief Technology Officer of the United States and Shannon Rudisill, Director of the Office of Child Care. He will be joined by Jim Steyer, CEO and Founder of Common Sense Media; Lesli Rotenberg, Senior Vice President, PBS; and Steven Levine, Senior Director, Community Empowerment Initiatives, Univision. (We will be posting his commentary later today.)

We are proud to support the President’s commitment to ensuring that children from all socio-economic backgrounds have access to the kinds of early learning programs that will provide them with the solid foundation that they will need to succeed in school. Studies have shown that investing in a young child’s early education provides benefits that can help prevent an achievement gap due to lack of access at a critical stage in a child’s development.

As part of this effort, the Cooney Center and New America are announcing our Map, Think, and Relink project. We will be working to create an online tool of initiatives around the country that are working to modernize parent outreach and early learning.  The tool will define initiatives by key dimensions such as: age, demographics, the types of tools used, the geographic range of their programs, and the incorporation of high-touch mentorship or on-the-ground programs. Our goal is to drive improvements in program quality by documenting the importance of evidence-based research.

The Summit will be broadcast live at whitehouse.gov. Please join us in following the conversation online today, and in sharing our commitment to our nation’s youth.

Learn more about the event from the White House announcement.

We recently released a new guide for parents called Family Time with Apps that features several resources, including Moms with Apps, to help parents find quality apps for their children. We invited them to describe their efforts to help families find age-appropriate apps and games that protect their kids’ privacy.

At Moms with Apps, we recently surveyed more than 400 parents about how they find apps for their children, what are the important criteria, and where they have challenges.  Some of the responses were expected: parents are concerned about the educational quality and age-appropriateness of the app, and whether their children’s privacy is protected.

There’s some great news, which I’ll get to later. But the most concerning survey result is this: When asked to rate their experience finding good apps on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being “very easy” and 5 being “very hard”), a full 49% of respondents chose 3, 4, or 5.

I get it. At home, I have two little ones who use apps, and at the office I’ve been working with developers since the advent of the app stores. Even though I have unique insight into the app economy and what developers are doing, I’ve still found it frustratingly difficult to find great apps for my kids.  There’s been no way to search by age range, and general queries for subjects like “spelling” or “phonics” turns up so many results that it feels impossible to sort through.  When I’ve found apps that I like, I tend to buy everything else the developer has done because they’re a known entity. (But there have been times when I thought I found a great app through traditional means, but was proven wrong. For example: My son liked the portion of BusyBee Studios’s ZooTrain where he would drag-and-drop letters in the proper order to spell a word.  So I looked for more apps like that. I found one that looked great—it had good reviews in the store, the graphics looked fun and engaging–but the first word presented was a four-letter word occasionally used for “rooster” that is also a four-letter word used for something very different and wholly inappropriate for a two-year-old. So to the survey respondent who wrote, “I don’t know if I can trust the reviews”—I HEAR YOU.)

Flickr / Peter Dutton

It’s why I’m so thankful that Moms With Apps is here and trying to solve some of these problems. The MWA mission? Help parents find great apps for their kids.

MWA originated as a group of kids’ app developers who wanted to share knowledge, help each other navigate the legal and regulatory hurdles around kids’ apps, and help boost each other’s profiles to cut through the noise. Eventually, as the apps stores became more and more crowded and everyone heard more and more stories of frustration from parents (and felt it themselves!), the need for a resource for parents became plainly obvious.  What you see now at MomsWithApps.com is the result of years of collaboration between developers and my talented colleagues, and it’s phenomenal.

This survey was a done as a gut-check to make sure that what we’re doing is really what parents want and need. It’s reassuring that many of the concerns parents voiced in our survey can be addressed by searching for apps at MWA. You can filter by whether the app has in-app purchases or ads (desiring the absence of such—or at least knowing from the outset if the app contains them—is a recurring theme in the survey results). You can search by whether or not the app works without internet (apps I’ve dubbed “The Road Trip Specials”). You can search by age range and subject, too. Which means you can search for apps with a level of specificity not found anywhere else, giving you the results you want. (And on the administrative side, we even have a private forum where we help developers and answer questions, including advising non-U.S. developers on proper terminology for things like roosters.)

In addition to finding apps at MWA, you can get to know the people behind them. The developers are parents, teachers, homeschooling parents, therapists, behaviorists, medical professionals, and more. Many of them started developing apps because they too couldn’t find what they wanted in the app stores.  On the MWA site, you can learn their stories, understand why they’re doing what they do, and know that the dollars you’re spending on quality apps are supporting small companies and entrepreneurs and other parents who are just trying to create something great.

MWA is continually making changes to meet parents’ needs and the changing realities of the app stores. With the help of our community, and readers like you, we can keep improving it so you can get the apps that are right for your kids.

While much of the survey focused on parents’ concerns with children’s apps, there was a lot of positivity and hope, too. Ninety-six percent of parents felt that their “children have benefited from using apps.”   That tells me that developers—from the small company started by a stay-at-home mom to the large companies with popular, well-known characters—are doing something right, and have children’s experiences and education at the top of mind.

And that makes me feel good about my kids using apps.

Melissa Lee is the chief of staff at ACT | The App Association, the leading organization representing software companies in the mobile app community. She is also the Moms With Apps Parent Evangelist, the in-house mom who uses apps with her kids and encourages other parents to explore what’s available for their families. Follow her on Twitter @MelissaAtACT

On November 19th, I covered the biannual Social Innovation Summit held in San Francisco for the Cooney Center and my colleagues at the Disruptor Foundation.  The summit brought together over 1,000 leaders interested in identifying, exploring, and actualizing partnership opportunities across the Business, Technology and Community sectors.

I came to the conference eager to learn more about the future of game-based learning (GBL) and its potential to effectively engage students, boost their learning outcomes and put them on a path towards lifelong learning. Given my enthusiasm for the space and my experience working for organizations like E-Line Media, Entertainment Software Association and Learning Games Network when I was an undergrad at University of Wisconsin, I was extremely excited to attend a pre-conference session focused on “play.”

The session was convened by Co.lab—a San Francisco based accelerator co-founded by New Schools Venture Fund and Zynga.org, and organized with the great leadership of Jessica Lindl, Managing Director of GlassLab, a joint venture of Electronic Arts, ETS, Pearson Foundation and the Entertainment Software Association. Co.lab focuses on startups that are interested in leveraging the power of digital games to enhance learning outcomes for PK-12 students.  Their goal is to cultivate world class businesses by providing funding opportunities, distribution channels and guidance. The lab is currently supporting its third cohort and a majority of the companies at this session were members.

The bulk of the session was set up as a speed-dating exercise where startups sat on one side and potential partners and funders sat on the other. Each startup had five minutes to pitch their business to the funders before moving on to the next. This process was meant to bolster the connection between much-needed capital and innovative ideas in an effective, time-urgent manner. It was expected that funders and startups would exchange business cards where appropriate and follow up with each other in the coming weeks.

The setup led to an interesting, intimate and effective session.  In the aftermath, funders ranging from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Blackbaud, Disney and Bill Gates’ top health adviser met to discuss ways to grow the game-based learning sector.  Those in attendance used terms like “truly inspiring,” “breathtakingly creative,” and “full of promise” to describe the innovations they learned about. The discussion also focused on major issues in the GBL space such as how to use a gaming platforms to personalize learning, bridge home and school use, and gain adoption in a truly difficult formal learning market.

The session resulted in crucial capacity-building between a diverse set of stakeholders, all of whom have a shared interest in transforming the education sector through game-based learning. It is my sincere hope that the relationships formed through this session will continue to grow and deepen over the next several months but will also lead to solving some of the major concerns brought up by the funders.

Below are brief highlights on the companies that attended the session:

Wonder Workshop seeks to teach computer programming to children through robotics. The company aims to teach kids as young as five, an age that is often neglected when it comes to computer programming. It is currently an out-of-school product but has a funded pilot underway in 25 schools.

Mindblown Labs creates highly interactive, experiential learning tools to empower young people to make better life decisions. The game that they shared with us was called Thrive ‘n’ Shine, which was actualized through a very successful Kickstarter campaign. The app is aimed at teaching teens and young adults about personal finance. The company has already impacted 5,000 teens and young adults but has a goal of impacting 20 million by 2020.

Kizoom Labs has built several award-winning apps that have rallied kids and parents around the importance of brain science. The company was developed on the idea that when kids (ages 6-11) recognize the power of their own brains, they build cognitive skills and gain confidence and openness to learning new things. Disney and Pixar have recently adapted this concept and are producing a feature film on the topic in early 2015. The movie, Inside Out, follows the emotions of an 11-year-old girl.

Kiko Labs was founded by Grace Wardhana and Tim Lopez, two seasoned gaming executives. They were unsatisfied with the current educational offerings for young children and believed they could combine intelligent game design with evidence-based scientific research to create a learning system that was both fun and effective in fostering vital cognitive skills for future learning. Their first product is called Thinking Time and focuses on children aged 3-7.

Learning Games Network is a multi-institution consortium linking scholars and designers at University of Wisconsin and MIT.  The Network convenes perhaps the premier GBL research summit annually known as Games Learning Society. Its senior researchers include well known scholars and innovators such as Kurt Squire, Constance Steinkuehler, Eric Klopfer and Scot Osterweil.  The Network also conducts ongoing professional development and recently released a remarkable game called Radix.

Galxyz is a science-based game aimed at teaching children K-12 about the universe. Osman Rashid, the CEO of the company, got inspiration for the game from his two young daughters and the perception that: “students have more capacity to learn than we give them credit for. They are naturally perceptive and will easily see through products that seek to fool them into thinking they’re fun.”

Code Monkey is an interactive game that teaches you to code in a real language (CoffeeScript). It is aimed at ages 8-16 and provides one semester of content. The product has grown organically to 4,000 classrooms since June and has been entering around 400 new classrooms a week.

Motion Math is a suite of games that help students master K-6 Common Core aligned math. Its co-founder Jacob Klein told me that in addition to the help their team has received from co.lab, they got a “huge boost” when they gained runner-up status in the JGCC inaugural innovation prize competition in 2010.  To date they have logged more than three million downloads and are now focusing on transitioning from their popular home-based product to a classroom product. You can read more about MM’s excellent research on the efficacy of their approach here.

Piper was launched by two recent Princeton graduates on the principle that kids need to become creators of the future rather than just consumers. With this in mind, they created a hacker toolbox that teaches kids eight and up how to build electronics by playing minecraft.  The team plans to release the toolkit this coming Spring.  Below is what it looks like!

After taking some time to reflect on my experience at the Summit, let me share two key takeaways related to the education space:

1.  Games as Low Stakes Safe Environments for Learning. The startup/entrepreneurial world always talks about the importance of failure to enhance learning but this has not been a prominent strategy for learning in the classroom. High stakes learning through standardized tests is under great scrutiny now as the debate over ensuring students’ mastery of content domains remains heated.  One takeaway from the developers is that games may help educators concentrate on both high and low stakes if done well. We need to concentrate on “lowering the stakes” for many students to gain mastery of the material. In other words, games can help students learn through experience. Fail, learn. Fail, learn. Succeed.
   

2. All Students Can Succeed if Given Support and Confidence. Nirvan Mullick who created the viral documentary film Caine’s Arcade discussed 9-year-old Caine Monroy’s journey. He explained that before Caine became famous and participated in speaking engagements around the world, he had a stutter and was considered “challenged” by his teachers. He was likely going to be held back. Now, Caine is considered “gifted” by his teachers, is excelling in school and no longer has a stutter. In the words of Nirvan: “Every child should be given the skills to imagine a world they can build.”

Available for iBooks at itunes.com/familytimewithapps

Can you turn screen time into family time?  Our new resource, Family Time with Apps: A Guide to Using Apps with Your Kids, provides tips on how apps can be a part of family learning, communication and connecting to one another.  Starting today, it is available to download for free from the iBook store.

The guide is an extension of our research on how families use and learn from media.  From Learning: Is there an app for that? to Learning at home:  Families’ educational media use in America, we have explored how new forms of digital media are influencing young children and their families.  In particular, we’re interested in “The New Co-Viewing,” or the idea that when families enjoy and interact with media together, they benefit more.  While the medium may be relatively new, the concept is firmly rooted in the landmark study of our founder Joan Ganz Cooney.

The new Family Time with Apps guide offers its own opportunity for “co-viewing” by providing kid-friendly comic strips to show situations where using apps as a family is better than playing alone.  Whether the challenge is preparing for a new experience like starting school, spending more time outside, connecting to distant loved ones, or reading together every day, the guide provides tips on how using apps together can support a child’s learning and development. Even playing games together can be a chance to grow, by helping children to practice good decision-making skills (not to mention the fun they have by being the expert in the family).  The guide also shares strategies for how to establish a good routine for using apps and how to select apps that are best for your family.

Many parents struggle with the decision of whether, when and how to introduce apps to their children.  For my own young daughter, I am constantly amazed and still a little wary of the power that apps can hold.  Our own parents may have had similar questions about the effects of television, but without the prevalence that comes with being available any time and anywhere—including on the bus, at the park or at the dinner table.  We hope that this new resource offers useful research-based tips, while supporting those time-honored parents’ instincts that help us all navigate family time with media.

This post is part of Seeding Reading, an series of articles and analysis by New America’s Ed Policy Program and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. See also the Learning Tech section of EdCentral.org and the JGCC blog.

Over the past few months, we’ve shared some highlights of the literacy app analysis that we are conducting with New America to learn more about the apps that families and educators are using to help children learn skills such as alphabet recognition, phonics, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. We have been digging into the app store, looking at the lists of “top 50 educational” paid and free apps in the iTunes, Google Play, and Amazon app stores to examine the types of skills that these apps aim to develop.  We know that browsing these lists is one of the primary ways that parents find educational apps for their children–but we know too that parents value reviews and recommendations from organizations.

For this post we were interested in comparing the apps that appear in these top 50 lists to those awarded accolades by popular media rating groups, including Parents’ Choice Foundation, Common Sense Media, and Children’s Technology Review. To find these apps we collected lists of those that had won awards from each of these media rating organizations between 2012 and 2014, culminating in a list of 303 apps that had won at least won award from one of the organizations.  Of this list, 66 apps (22%) targeted children between birth and age eight and had a focus on language and literacy development, and were thus included in our sample.

Finding 1: Very few of the popular paid and free apps won awards from top media ratings groups

Notably, 11 (or 17%) of the 66 award-winning apps with a focus on language/literacy were already in our sample as apps that were among the 50 most popular educational apps in the Tunes, Google Play, and/or Amazon app store during our sampling period.¹  These apps are listed in the table below.

We were perplexed to find so few of the award-winning apps among the Top 50 educational apps in the app stores during the two months of our sampling. This finding suggests there may be a disconnect between what parents buy for their children and what media products experts think are good for children. These differences may also reflect higher rates of marketing that producers of the most popular apps are doing to promote their products.  Furthermore, it is not clear what particular algorithms are used by each app store to compile their Top 50 lists; this lack of transparency is also discussed in our first blog post.

There is an important caveat to this finding; namely, that these app samples were drawn from a particular point in time. We tracked the Top 50 educational apps across iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play stores over 8 weeks in February and March, 2014.  The award lists represent apps that have won awards from 3 media rating organizations between 2012-2014.  Thus, more of the popular apps may have won accolades from different organizations or at different times.  Similarly, the other 55 award-winning apps in our sample may have ranked among the Top 50 in app stores during different weeks. Still, it is notable that most of the apps that were popular at a given time did not win awards from top media ratings organizations within the same year or several years prior.

Our additional findings, reported below, include analyses of the developers’ app descriptions we coded from app stores, and were conducted with our full sample of 181 apps.

Finding 2: Award-winning apps tend to cost a little bit more than popular paid apps

One striking trend we noticed early on was that the majority (87.9%) of award-winning apps were paid apps, rather than those freely available.  This led us to wonder whether there were differences in average costs between the paid awarded apps and paid popular apps (i.e. “Top 50 Educational” in markets).  We coded the cost of apps in categories from “less than $1.00” to “more than $10.00.”  As shown in the figure below, on average, the awarded apps cost a bit more than the apps that were among the Top 50 educational paid apps in the app stores, although the difference was not dramatic ($1.00 – $2.00 for popular apps vs. $2.01 – $3.00 for award-winning apps, on average).

The reasons for this trend are not clear from our market scan, though we have a few hypotheses. It may be more resource-intensive to produce high quality apps, particularly to the extent that their creation involves the participation of education, child development, or literacy experts (as we describe in blog post 2).  Thus, the higher cost to produce the highest quality apps, which in turn are more likely to win accolades from ratings groups, may be reflected in their relatively higher price. It may also be that parents are drawn to lower cost apps for their children’s use, and price is one factor driving the popularity of relatively cheaper apps in app markets.  Price and popularity may also have a cyclical relationship.  That is, if parents are largely drawn to free apps, then the high rates of downloads may boost those apps into the Top 50 lists in app stores, putting them before the eyes of parents who mainly search for the most popular apps.

In any event, these trends may have critical implications for which families download the highest quality educational apps.  If the vast majority of award-winning apps are paid rather than free apps, and those paid apps are more expensive on average than other paid apps for children, it is likely that more children of parents with higher incomes will end up with the highest quality apps, compared to their peers.  In fact, a similar trend—named the “app gap” for the gap in educational app ownership between higher- and lower-income U.S. families—has been borne out in 2013 research by Common Sense Media.

Finding 3: The most popular free apps are less likely to have the highest user ratings compared to popular paid or awarded apps.  

Given that we used two separate sources to compile our sample of apps, we wondered further whether there might be differences in the user ratings of apps that were among the “Top 50” educational apps in the markets and those that were given awards by media-ratings groups.  Some of the apps were available in multiple app stores, so to address this question we looked at each app’s mean rating across stores.  With regards to the Top 50 paid and Top 50 free samples, we included only the ratings from the stores in which an app was among the top 50 educational apps (for example, if an app was among the top 50 free apps in iTunes and in Amazon then we averaged the user ratings from those two stores in the calculations for the figure below).  As shown in the figure below, we found that Top 50 free apps were less likely than award-winning or Top 50 paid apps to have received the highest ratings from parents (4.5 or higher out of 5.0).

We plan to revisit this finding with additional data in order to shed more light on this trend.  Anecdotally, our team has been finding that “free” apps often provide little content for free.  Rather, they often consist of a “skeleton” or “snack pack” of the app with very limited content, and then promote the purchase of additional content within the app.  It may be that this phenomenon factors into parents’ ratings of the apps, particularly if app descriptions are not clear about the extent of content provided in the free version of the app.  That is, parents may download the app expecting a fully-outfitted app, and then are disappointed to find it contains very little actual content.  As mentioned above, it is also possible that app price reflects quality to some extent and that parents tend to be less impressed by the quality of free apps.

Of note is the similarity between ratings of Top 50 paid and award-winning apps.  It seems that, in general, parents are equally pleased with the “Top 50” paid apps as they are with the award-winning apps reviewed by media-ratings organizations once they download them.

Finding 4: The same language/literacy skills are common across popular paid, popular free, and award-winning apps

To follow up on analyses from blog post 2, we also looked for possible differences in the specific language/literacy skills that award-winning apps claim to teach, compared to the Top 50 paid and free apps.  For this analysis we looked only at the most commonly mentioned skills, limiting our scope to those skills mentioned in the descriptions of at least 6% of apps.  our analysis also indicates that the same few skills are among the most commonly targeted language/literacy skills across award-winning and top paid and free samples.  In each of the three samples, teaching basic skills like alphabet/letter sound knowledge and vocabulary development were the most commonly encountered skills in app descriptions.  Reiterating commentary from our earlier post, it may be the case that parents are seeking out apps that teach these things, or that apps just tend to teach these particular skills well (leading to their popularity with parents and with expert media raters).  A related possibility, which should be explored with a larger future sample of language/literacy-focused apps, is that it is easier for developers to incorporate these relatively basic skills, or that perceived demand is driving their choices of what kinds of apps to design.  For example, developers may perceive a greater market for apps for toddlers and preschool-age children compared to later elementary school.

However, the trends in the figure below suggest that award-winning apps are slightly less likely than popular paid or free apps to target seven of the eight most common skills.  The exception was “learning to write or type letters,” which was relatively rare across all three of the app samples.  These analyses examine the percentages of apps that mention each of the most common skills; as detailed below, we were also interested in how many different skills a given app claimed to target on average.

Finding 5: Award-winning apps tend to target only 1 or 2 skills simultaneously

Next, we computed a sum for each app of how many different skills were mentioned in its description.  The findings from this analysis shed some light on Finding 3 above.  As shown in the figure below, the majority of award-winning apps (61%) claimed to teach only one or two language/literacy skills based on their descriptions.  This was the case for only 36% of top paid apps and 39% of top free apps, which were each more likely to target three or more different skills in a single app.  What is more, the award-winning apps were most likely to mention at least one specific language/literacy skill in their descriptions; only 4.5% of award-winning apps did not mention language/literacy-learning at all or claimed to target only general language/literacy development with no mention of specific skills.  Conversely, 9.1% of top paid and 15.3% of top free app descriptions did not mention specific language/literacy skills targeted by the apps.

It is not clear from these data why we are seeing these trends.  It may be that educational apps that focus narrowly on just a few skills tend to be of higher quality than those that try to teach more skills simultaneously, or that reviewers at media-rating organizations feel that it is best to teach only a few targeted skills in a single app.  It is also possible that parents tend to be drawn to apps that claim to teach a greater number of skills at once; and thus the top educational apps in app stores tend to have this characteristic, while the award-winning apps (most of which were not among the top educational apps in the stores) do not.  This finding also highlights an important gap where more research is needed; to our knowledge, there is no available research indicating whether focusing narrowly on just one or two language/literacy skills in an app or aiming to teach multiple skills simultaneously is better for young children’s learning.

More in store for “What’s in Store”!

Taken together, these few early findings suggest that parents encounter different kinds of apps when they search for language- and literacy-focused educational apps for their children, depending on where they go to look for those apps.  For example, parents who consult media-rating websites, like Common Sense Media, appear to encounter slightly more expensive apps than those who look to the “top” educational apps in iTunes, Google Play, or Amazon app stores.  Those who are willing to pay for children’s educational apps, and browse the media-ratings sites or paid app markets, tend to find apps that have slightly higher user-ratings, compared to those who seek popular free language/literacy apps.

These particular codes represent only a subset of our market scan coding, and we look forward to releasing more insights in future posts.  Currently, our team is engaged in our second round of coding of the same sample of 181 apps, which involves documenting aspects of the actual mechanics and content of the apps.  Eventually we will be able to conduct cross-analyses with these two levels of coding, examining, for example, whether certain features are more common among award-winning or “Top 50” popular apps or vary by cost or user-rating.  So please stay tuned for future posts and for the full report of our findings in the Seeding Reading book, to be published in 2015 with our partners at New America in Washington, D.C.

¹ Given that these apps were simultaneously top apps in the markets and highly rated by expert groups they are included in both samples in analyses comparing “Top 50” apps to “award-winning” apps.