From Akron Children’s #techtuesday  blog    http://inside.akronchildrens.org/2012/05/08/techtuesday-photo-touch-apps-aim-to-help-children-learn-through-sight-sound-and-touch/

The good news is there are speech apps out there that will have your kids chomping at the bit to do their homework. The bad news: Your kids will keep begging to use your iPad after they try these apps.

Language comes so naturally to many of us. But for some kids, communication is a struggle. Parents and speech therapists have to wrestle with these kids to practice their language skills. And lots of repetition is the key to success.

Educational apps can help ease that struggle. In fact, at my house, the homework blues have been replaced with setting limits on homework app time. My youngest, a curious preschooler, also loves these apps, and we only have one iPad to go around.

Akron Children’s speech pathologist Lisa Gonidakis, CCC-SLP, recommends these Photo Touch apps to help your child enhance her speech and language skills. They rely on sight, sound and touch to help children learn and stay engaged. You can adjust the settings to include only the concepts and objects that are appropriate for your child.

Preschool Games – Farm Animals: This easy-to-use app is ideal for children ages 0 to 6. Kids follow the prompt to identify the named object. Every time your child answers three questions  in a row correctly, the app jumps to the next level and starts to display one more item per page. This app is free, so it’s a good one to start with to see if you, or even more importantly, your child likes the format.

Sight Words: This Photo Touch app’s “interface is so easy to use that even a 9 month old baby will delight in using this app.” Kids are encouraged to identify sight words from a group of words on the screen. The narrator reads a word and the child has to identify which word he heard. When he gets the answer right, he is rewarded with praise, including phrases like “Sweet!” This app is also free.

Toddler Games Toys: This app helps children ages 0-6 learn words and objects by sight, sound and touch. It’s great for receptive and expressive vocabulary and photo discrimination. As with the other Photo Touch apps, you can also customize it with your own voice and images. This app costs 99 cents.

Kids Learning: This Photo Touch Concepts app offers a fun way to reinforce contrasts. It covers left versus right, large-medium-small, above and below, and different versus alike. Another neat feature is that you can use your own voice to reward your child for the correct answer. This Kids Learning – Photo Touch Concepts app is 99 cents.

While it’s easy to let kids immerse themselves in these apps, Gonidakis encourages parents to play these apps with their children. After all, apps are valuable by what you do with them, not by what they are.

“Discuss the apps and help them to carryover learned skills through play,” Gonidakis said. “Apps related to your child’s speech and language goals should be discussed with your teacher or speech-language pathologist to ensure that settings and tasks are appropriate to address their needs.”

Gonidakis stresses that the iPad/iPod is just a tool in our toolbox of learning and language. It does not replace speech and language therapy and will not provide a “quick fix” to your child’s need

 Okay, let’s face it, living with Cystic Fibrosis (in your body or in your household) can make for some very stressful days.  And who couldn’t use 5 or 10 minutes of guided meditation helping to let go of the stress.  “Simply Being” is one of several meditation apps that run around .99 cents in the app store.  These apps were designed by Meditation Oasis and have been featured in Shape magazine and The New York Times.

The guided meditation lets you pick music or nature sounds to overlay with the soothing meditation guide.   This simple applicaiton is good for beginners or experienced meditators.  And its seems to me this is a must-have for the next time my daughter is hospitalized.  Hopefully a few minutes spent in guided meditation will keep me from throttling an unsuspecting doctor or nurse when the stress gets too high and the sleep deprivation too great.

I just found this great new app for kids.    Xperica’s app is a virtual science lab that allows kids to conduct virtual experiments.   Four experiments come with the free app and then there are in-app purchases for additional experiments.

I downloaded this today and my two sons couldn’t put it down.  Its educational because it explains the scientific principles behind what they are doing, but it is also fun and interactive.   My favorite part is that it doesn’t make a mess in my kitchen!!

This app has great potential for school age students who need hands on opportunities to understand the principles discussed in class, but are stuck at home or in a doctors office.

Apple announced today that it has created a FREE Mac App that allows the user to create iBooks. 

You can use a template or you can start from scratch and create multi-touch, interactive books for use on your iPad.   The potential for CF education is amazing.  Now, pharmaceuticals, CF care teams, and CF parents can create age appropriate educational stories for CF patients to read on the iPad.   Even better, once created, the books can be shared within the community.

I’m very excited about the potential here.   Now I just have to find someone with a Mac to give it a try.   If you have a Mac, you can download the app here….and please let me know what you think.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ibooks-author/id490152466?enlh=9&mt=12&ls=1

If you are a student (or a professor, like me) check out the wide variety of apps available for viewing textbooks on your ipad and tablet devices. 

I teach an online course, so I adopted an online text a little over a year ago as a great interface with the online classroom.   About 6 months ago the company I use for the online text created a mobile app and I’m hooked.   CourseSmart’s mobile app for textbooks has a great interface.  You see the texts exactly as they look in print.  You can keep all of your textbooks on your bookshelf in one place.  I particiularly like that I can take notes directly on the pages, print anything I want to keep a hard copy of, and the navigation is pretty specific with detailed table of contents.   CourseSmart lets student “rent” the text for the period of the semester at a much reduced price from the cost of traditional texts.  

I’ve done some searching and there are only a limited number of high school texts available, but I imagine this will grow as demand increases.   Every text I use for college courses have been available thus far.  I just love the idea of always having access to my textbooks without having to carry a huge pile of books around with me all the time.   For a student who is also a CF patient, an app like CourseSmart means you can always have your texts with you. . .even in the hospital or at a doctor’s office.

Did you know that you can use your iPad to remotely access and control your home computer?  Now if you are sitting in a doctor’s appointment or stuck at the hospital you can still access all the files and programs on your home or work computer.  

  There are a variety of Remote Desktop (RDP) apps available in the app store.  Some range in price from $5-$12 dollars, but there are trial and lite versions for free that work very well.   I have RDP-lite.   An easy set up screen asks for the IP Address of the computer you wish to remotely control.   As long as you keep that computer on and connected to the internet, you can control it from wherever you are with your iPad.  You can pull up a powerpoint file and launch the program to do some fast editing or  grab a picture/document you left on your desktop.

I really like that I can access my desktop, but I’m not quite used to the interface.  My windows computer wasn’t designed to be used with the iPad’s touch screen navigation.  Also,  RDP apps need to be used wisely.   There is potential for security issues, so using care to set up the security features is essential.  My workplace requires a VPN connection before I can access my work network. 

Anyone else out there have a remote desktop program they like?

In my daughter’s five years of life, she has had three surgeries, six hospitalizations, 20 emergency room visits, and countless doctor’s appointments.  At most of these visits, especially the emergency ones, they ask for a detailed list of medications and surgery/admission dates.   In times of emergency, the last thing any brain can handle is the details needed for the admitting forms.   Enter an app that can keep track of all this information and pull it up at a moment’s notice.

Care4Kids is a free app available for  ipads and iphones.  There is also a version for android phones.  Care4Kids was created by Akron Children’s Hospital.  Many of the features are designed for patients of the hospital… it includes links for a directory of phone numbers, find-a-doc and hospital videos.   The most universally useful feature is the health records portion.

In the health records section, you can store your family’s health information for quick reference.  The app allows you to create a profile for each member of your family and then enter any of their medical information you choose.  The records can be sent to other families using the app so you only have to enter the information once.  For safety, you can password protect the information.   There are spaces for vision prescriptions, allergies, medications, surgical and illness history, immunization records, insurance (including plan numbers, co-pay and deductible amounts),  providers and emergency contacts. 

The download is free, and as an added bonus thank you for downloading the app, those that use Akron Children’s hospital can bring up a screen that can be shown for a free parking pass in one of the Akron Children’s parking decks.