Family Tech Blog

Tag: reading

  • Tech Toys Teach the Love of Reading

    Tech Toys Teach the Love of Reading

    Using technology to teach the love of reading isn’t new. Amazon and Barnes and Noble did it with their Kindle and Nook. Now we’re seeing products come out to help children love reading as well. The show floor at CES2020 had several products designed to teach the love of reading. Here are a couple of those products I thought were super unique and cool. 

    Bookinu

    Audiobooks are a great way to consume content while you’re busy doing other things. Reading out loud to your children has been touted as critical for their development. Some products give your kids the ability to hear books being read to them but Bookinu allows the narrator to be you. 

    Bookinu is for children from three to seven years old. It encourages them to love reading through an easy to use app for parents. Moms and dads open the app and read any book they would like into the app. You put a sticker on the book and scan it with the Booking. The Bookinu will then playback your reading of the story through the Bookinu devices so that the child is hearing the book read to them in your voice. It is very easy to use and can be taken anywhere. It can store books internally so that you don’t need a wifi connection to play the content for your child. There is also a headphone jack and a speaker built-in. 

    Dipongo

    “Dipongo is the first creative app for personalized stories mixing both real and virtual worlds.” – Dipongo Website 

    Using voice recognition the app chooses the right story for kids based on their likes and dislikes. You then use tangible objects to influence the story through photos and augmented reality. Kids create, draw, build, and mold to get the story to continue. The story changes somewhat based on what you choose to insert into the narrative. If you build a bridge to get over the valley they’ll cross it. If you take a photo of a plane, they’ll fly across. 

    Stories on Dipongo are co-authored with childhood and creativity professionals. The award-winning app was designed to educate kids on problem-solving, socialization, and contributing to a story. Watching the example on the show floor at CES caused me to smile a silly grin that wouldn’t go away. The cute characters and unique challenges are sure to keep your kids entertained for a long time, all the while teaching them some very useful skills. 

    Counterintuitive? 

    It may seem silly to use technology to try and encourage your kids to love a not so tech-centric activity like reading. Why not harness something they already use to encourage such a helpful skill. If reading out loud to our kids is such a great thing then an app that lets us read to them whenever we would like can only be super helpful. If we don’t allow it to replace the times we sit with them in person it can be a great tool. Using behaviors from Alexa and GoogleAssistant to read to our kids is neat but the voice of their parent isn’t being heard. Bookinu gives loved ones the ability to re-insert themselves into the read-aloud activity that is so beneficial. 

    Giving older kids a way to interact with stories through augmented reality and building with tangible items is a wonderful idea also. This allows them to get lost in storytelling in a way that they may have never before. Storytelling and creativity is critical and will always be skills that kids can harness to be successful in the future. Dipongo gives them a head start on those problem solving and storytelling skills. 

    The goal is to find tech that entices our kids to learn and gives them tools that they’ll need to succeed. There is a lot of tech out there that distracts our children and can even become harmful. I was excited to find these two options that give parents the ability to harness their kids’ love of tech to encourage a love of learning. The love of learning will serve their children well for the rest of their lives. 

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  • Is iBooks Storytime Looking to Replace Mommy and Daddy?

    Is iBooks Storytime Looking to Replace Mommy and Daddy?

     

    “I’m bored.” This is the most terrible phrase for a parent to hear their kids say. Seriously, parents would pay ungodly amounts of money for just a couple hours of boredom. Boredom sounds so relaxing but our children are complaining about it. Our most common response to this phrase is “Go get a book and read.” We still have a couple who can’t read so they want us to read to them. That’s a good thing to do (More on that later.) but aren’t you busy? I know I am. Now you can say “go turn on the TV and read.” It’ll even read to them. But is that such a good thing?

    Enter iBook StoryTime

    Offering classic kids books, new stories, read-aloud narration, and Hi-Def illustrations, StoryTime is looking to be “an engaging place for young readers to enjoy the stories they love.” (App Store) StoryTime is available for AppleTV as well so stories can be viewed on larger screens. Pages flip automatically and there is an option to turn off the narration so you can read to your child yourself.

    The question is whether or not apps like iBooks StoryTime encourage reading or just disguise screen time to seem like it’s educational. Many experts have recently concluded that too much screen time is bad for the development of children. Obviously we can see the concerns with attention span or problems in social situations but one issue that relates specifically to this app is :

    an internalization that all actions have an immediate effect, and all stimuli elicit a quick response. – Psychology Today

    screenshot-2016-11-30-12-44-14This constant immediate reward from the quick response of digital media can lead to a preference to screen type activities and addictive behavior. 

    Reading to our children is critical. One of the most significant benefits is how reading together builds and strengthens our relationship with our kids. If a pre-recorded narrator is doing all the reading to our children, they are building a relationship with that screen and not with mom and dad. There are of course enough benefits to reading, no matter how. Kids who read well do better in every subject in school. Children who have been read to are better at communicating and reading to them at a young age makes it easier for them to learn to read when the time comes.

    Numerous studies have shown that students who are exposed to reading before preschool are more likely to do well in all facets of formal education.

    The most important thing is balance. An app like StoryTime can be a great tool to inspire and encourage reading in our children’s lives. It can also be a way to distract them so that we can do whatever thing we feel is urgent enough to cause us to neglect the important activity of bonding with our kids. We just have to be careful.

    My wife can’t even read a book on a screen. She says that there is something to the tactile effect of turning a page. The smell of the pages and even the sound of pages rustling as you go from chapter to chapter. I’m not sure if science backs up all of that but there is a ton of research leading experts to believe that even though an app like StoryTime can be a good tool, nothing beats sitting with your child, opening up a book, and reading together.