eBook Review: Green Eggs and Ham

Green Eggs and Ham
Oceanhouse Media
$3.99 from Amazon App Store
Read on Kindle Fire

Green Eggs and Ham!  I'm trying to like them, Sam I am!

This is the same people who did Rudolph.  So.  Some of the same stuff stands.  Kinda creepy, annoying narrator and those big red words that pop out when you click on pictures.  It's psychedelically annoying.  I might just be a party pooper about this, but I'd rather have some of other kind of interaction.  They sell this book for $3.99 on name recognition, mostly.

The problem is, my kid LOVES this.  He asks for Sam-I-am and loves the train going through the tunnel and the accompanying choo choo sounds.  He points out the eggs, he points out the ham, and he says "I do not like them, Sam-I-am!" at dinner when I'm trying to get him to eat something green.  We have a few Dr Seuss compilations that we read from, so he recognizes the art and the cadence.

I'd rather listen to Moxy Fruvous than read this eBook, but I'm not the boss of me.  My 2 year old is.

App Review: Nursery Rhymes with StoryTime

The Nursery Rhymes with StoryTime app is an interactive ebook app from ustwo for iPad. The look of it is gorgeous. The illustrations are reminiscent of 19th century woodcuts, vividly colored. Each nursery rhyme (there are 8 of them) is presented in two "pages" and each page has at least one interactive element. The text is incorporated as part of the illustration, and some of the text moves or reacts along with the images on each page. The narration can be turned on or off, and the reader is a British woman with a pleasant voice.

The interactive elements are fun but don't add much, if anything, to the comprehension of the rhymes. There's some wit and ingenuity to the design in some rhymes, e.g. Humpty Dumpty cracks open and the King's horses and men spill out; but in others, like the Grand Old Duke, it feels a bit more random. The humor is a little bizarre, with a tinge of the macabre. The sound effects when Jack and Jill tumble down the hill or get smacked with fish from the well (yes, you read that right) sound like an old kung fu movie, and after you cut the tails off the three blind mice with your carving knife guillotine, you can send the severed tails careening around the screen, or reattach them and cut them off again. Of course, this is my 3-year-old son's favorite part of the ebook. He thinks it's hilarious.

Overall, though, it seems that he's already getting a little bored with it. The interactive elements are quickly mastered and there's not much else to discover. After playing with it a short time I noticed he was already skipping some pages and even his favorites didn't hold his attention long. At $3.99 it doesn't break the bank, but as great as it looks I doubt we'll get hours and hours of entertainment from this one.

Review by Genesis Hansen

App Review: Baby Sign ASL

Baby Sign ASL, Version 1.05

By iDev2.com

$4.99 on iTunes

Baby sign language is very popular right now, and I want to jump on that bandwagon.  My daughter Jordan is five months old, so I plan to start teaching her some basic sign language.  I have a book and a DVD, but do I have time to deal with that?  No.  This Baby Sign ASL app is perfect.  There are more than enough words here (don’t cheap out and get a free version- it is a waste of time).  Each word is demonstrated through a clear video.  You can add your favorites to a list and quiz yourself.  You can search alphabetically or by categories.  I spent about five minutes with the app today, and I have a few signs in mind (mommy, daddy, milk, and bath) that I plan to show Jordan tonight.  While I was watching the videos, I couldn’t help thinking of Robert DeNiro’s character teaching his grandson signs in “Meet the Fockers”.

Review by Leslie McNabb

eArticle: Chris Stevens on Alice for the iPad

Check out Chris Stevens on Alice for the iPad, Book Apps, and Toronto: a Q & A to hear the story of the phenomenon that knocked publishers on their patoots in 2010.  Stevens shares how a fortuitous combination of unemployment, hard work and technical skills resulted in the development of a new, interactive format that sparked a mad rush to get on the interactive eBook bandwagon.  He gives a scathing overview of the eBook industry:

What’s happening at the moment is that most publishers are handing their major titles over to app developers who are ruining these titles with rushed, unprofessional layout and design. There is this weird situation where programmers are suddenly being given free rein to design books. We watch as publishers like Random House outsource the design of cherished titles to programmers who—despite their excellence at programming—are not designers. The complete lack of care and attention paid to the production of digital books is genuinely mystifying.

He does, however, give props to Nursery Rhymes with StoryTime (which we will review shortly), and tells about some new projects he has been working on.  I can't wait to read Alice in New York!

eBook Review: Dog Story: Learning Opposites

Dog Story: Learning Opposites is no great work of literature.

HOWEVER:

The interactivity of this eBook kept my 2 year old and me occupied for a very, very long time. You can choose Auto Play or Read to Me.  On each page you are presented with simple text like "This dog is big and this dog is small," with the respective canines pleasingly rendered with manipulatable doggy apparatuses such as bones, food bowls, trees (on which to pee, one would assume), newspapers, doghouses and balls.

Each page has a different schtick: a fence becomes a xylophone, flowers fall from the tree, the bones spin around.  You can tap on the dogs to see and hear the opposite words. You turn pages by tapping the purple arrows in the bottom corners, and there are buttons at the top left for repeating the narration and removing the text. The narrator has a calming voice and the music isn't annoying.  A great free app.  Available through iTunes too.

App Review: Drawing Pad

We first encountered Drawing Pad (Amazon) at the Apple store.  We then went home and installed it on both the Kindle Fire and Galaxy Tab because it was such a hit with the little dude.

You can use digital crayons, pencil crayons, markers, stamps, coloured paper and stickers. The sticker function is by FAR the most awesome. There are stickers of fish, vehicles, insects, faces, flowers, birds and animals, all of which can be shrunk or enlarged and moved around until you "stamp" it to make it stick permanently. The drawer that holds all the tools opens and closes, and Little J can now navigate his way through the drawer to change colours or tools, as well as scrap his piece of artwork and start over again.

Drawing Pad (iTunes) is an awesome app for learning fine motor movement, playing with paint without making a mess, and making the train go choo choo down the track.  Totally worth the $1.99 and good for kids from 2 up.

eBook Review: Fire Truck

Fire Truck by Ivan Ulz has been a favourite in our house for quite some time.  It only occurred to me recently that it could be considered an eBook. Slippery things, these eBooks, aren't they?  It was part of a series of  tree books  called "Sing and Read Storybooks" published by Scholastic.  This particular book is out of print, but there are others in the serious that are still available. (On a side note, the Scholastic website is TERRIBLE for searching.  And there is no link for this series of books.  They have got to get some librarians to work on that.)

The illustrations are great and contain all the requisite parts that make preschoolers go wild: ladders, hoses, spotted canines, wheels, bells and sirens.  There's a reason this video has been watched nearly 3 million times- the little dudes dig it.

The song sounds monotonous on first listen, but once you've heard it a few times, it gets kinda groovy.  And you know what's even groovier?  When you're driving in your car, and a firetruck drives by, and your kid starts belting it out from the back seat.

eBook Review: The Elephant's Child: How the Elephant Got His Trunk

This one's for you, Dad!  (My dad loves Rudyard Kipling)

The Elephant's Child: How the Elephant Got His Trunk is a free eBook from B&N.  The narrator is awesome.  He sounds like he should be narrating a PBS nature show.  About elephants.

Poor baby elephant has bad role models and absentee parents. All the animals of the savannah keep telling him to stop asking questions.

"So many questions! Take your nosy-nose somewhere else!"

The Kokoloko bird, channeling coyote or raven,  sends the little elephant off to go ask a crocodile what he eats for dinner.  CHOMP.  This is a slightly more violent tale than I would normally abide for my own little elephant, but it IS Rudyard Kipling, and he DOES hearken from the days of yore when cautionary tales were sprinkled with chomping crocodiles, child-eating witches and poisoned apples.  In the end, though, the elephant ends up with a dextrous schnozz and shares his story with the nasty creatures who wouldn't answer his questions earlier in the story.  Such is the love of a child.

FYI: Did you know that the term pachyderm is now obsolete?  It's true!  Wikipedia told me so.

App Review: First Words

Review submitted by the lovely Genesis.


Here's my tip for getting through a restaurant meal with a toddler: get the FirstWords apps from Learning Touch. We have both the Animals and the Vehicles apps ($1.99 each). They also offer a Deluxe edition for $4.99 that has animals, vehicles, colors, shapes, etc.

FirstWords shows a picture of an animal or vehicle, with letter tiles spelling out the name of the object. There are corresponding letter tiles scattered randomly below the image and the child has to move the letter tiles to their appropriate place by correctly matching tiles. Each time my son touches a letter tile, the app reads the letter. When he touches the picture, the app says the name of the object. Once he successfully puts all the letter tiles in their correct places, the app reads each letter, says the whole word, and the picture spins, enlarges and makes the appropriate animal or vehicle sound before moving to the next word. The voice of the male reader is clear and pleasant.

There are some settings you can adjust to make it a little easier or harder depending on your child's age and familiarity with the app. I love that there are visual cues for beginners who don't know their alphabet yet. They can randomly move tiles around, but when they get close to the matching tile, it lights up.

My son adores these apps and was very quickly able to use them without help from Mom. He learned his alphabet by playing these games, picked up some vocabulary and now he gets that letters combine to make words. It's really fun to see him take skills he's picked up using the iPhone and apply them to reading print books. He loves to spell out titles and words in his books, and it's very natural to him to move between print and electronic media.

FirstWords apps are currently available for iPhone and iPad, and I thought they were worth every penny. New animals and vehicles have been added at no extra charge with periodic updates of the app, which helps to keep the game interesting. For less than the price of a mocha at Starbucks my son has had hours of entertainment and education, and it's so nice when my husband and I can actually sit and enjoy a cup of coffee at the end of a meal instead of taking turns chasing our energetic boy around a restaurant. Also great for car trips, plane rides, doctor's waiting rooms, or anytime the parent in charge needs a little break.

Learning Touch also makes a First Letters and Phonics app. My son loves it, but to me the voice of the reader/singer for the app is only slightly less grating than nails on a chalkboard. Caveat emptor!

ebook Review: I Love You, Daddy

Anyone who has been to my storytimes knows what a softie I am for books about Mama or Daddy Love.  You know, those overly sentimental books that make you feel all squishy inside about your kid and make you temporarily forget about all the concerts and bars you could be going to if you weren't on potty duty.

This is one of those books.  I Love You, Daddy is adorable.  I may have even gotten a little weepy at the end.  Beautiful watercolours, beautiful text and positive parenting are all present.  Unfortunately, there are no interactive features, and the only option is Read by Myself.  I would be really pleased with this eBook- except for the fact that I actually paid $2.99 for it.  If you have to pay something, there SHOULD be interactive content.  Otherwise, you may as well just read one of those old fashioned books.  The ones that take up space on shelves, collect dust and have to be shipped from Asia.

eBook Review: The Journey of the Noble Gnarble

The Journey of the Noble Gnarble is an epic tale of a little gnarble realizing his dreams and finding his way to the surface of the ocean in spite of  the dire predictions of naysaying blyfish.  He avoids being eaten by hungry warckel and a silver subbalubble,  but he does get eaten by a plink.  Our brave protagonist uses his gnarble noggin to get himself free, and finally reaches the surface.  On the last page he "flipped above the waves and smiled at the sun."  There are pterodactyl-type creatures flying above the surface of the waves, and my fatalistic little brain totally expected the gnarble to get gobbled up just as he achieved his goal.

We downloaded this book from B&N and read it on the Nook Color.   There is no interactivity,  but the illustrations are gorgeous and the rhyme is decent.  The audio sounded like someone recorded it on a tape recorder, and the narrator spoke in a  boring monotone.  She gives the blyfish a really horrible English accent.  Read this out loud to your older preschooler for best results.

A nice bit of wisdom from the Noble Gnarble:

The gnarble knew he'd come too close
to quit and give up now
"there must be some way out of here,
there's got to be somehow!"

eBook Review: Axel the Truck: Rocky Road

We used a Nook Color to read Axel the Truck: Rocky Road.  It was free, which is always a good start.  The writing is not terribly sophisticated( "Axel is a red truck. Axel has big, big wheels."), but there are sound effects, onomatopoeia, repetition and lots of action. And, of course, it is a story about a monster truck, which lends a lot of credence to its literary merit in the eyes of my 2.25 year old.

The reader is given the Read to Me/Read it Myself option, but there isn't any interactivity.  The narrator isn't annoying; I daresay he was almost pleasant to listen to.  Reading this book to ourselves felt just like reading a paper book: the screen displays two pages at a time,; you turn those pages with a swipe; you read the text, look at the picture and move on.  It's the same content; it just arrives in a different vehicle.  Ba doom boom.

In other news, Axl Rose isn't looking so hot these days.

Libraries Get the Shaft in Otherwise Cool Book

I just started reading John Palfrey and Urs Gasser's Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (review to come).

It depresses me that I didn't have to read any further than page 2 to hear libraries being slammed:

[Digital natives] study, work, write and interact with each other in ways that are very different from the ways you did growing up.  They read blogs rather than newspapers. They often meet each other online before they meet in person. they probably don't even know what a library card looks like; and if they do, they've probably never used it.

DAMN!  OUCH!  BLARG!

That hits right where it hurts.  Granted, this book was written in 2008 (that's TOTALLY ancient), and I don't remember seeing either of the authors at CLA this year to see all the cool stuff lots of public libraries are doing for these digital natives.  We're working on it, guys!

I held regular teen craft nights in my branch where we made duct tape iPod protectors.  We're acquiring all sorts of eReaders in my current library to train the staff with so they know what to do when someone comes in and says "I can't get this eBook to work!" We're working on changing the minds of the more conservative librarians who think that all a library will ever need to provide for young people is books and storytimes.  We're facebooking, tweeting, blogging, chat referencing and tumblring.  We're LMFAOing.  We're pimping our iPhones right along with our bookcarts.

But we can't compete with Amazon, iTunes, Google, B&N, The Pirate Bay or all sorts of other providers of digital entertainment when it comes to ease and convenience.  Not yet.  We need some of those digital natives to infiltrate the publishers to make it a little easier to lend digital content.

UPDATE:

Page 8 says this:

Librarians, too, are reimagining their role: Instead of primarily organizing book titles in musty card catalogs and shelving the books in the stacks, they serve as guides to an increasingly variegated information environment.

Ok, they get points for the "increasingly variegated information environment" bit, but these dudes must be old.  Card catalogues?  Librarians shelving books? That's just crazy talk.

eArticle Review: Publishers vs. Libraries: An E-Book Tug of War

Publishers can be such buzz killers. This is what we're dealing with in the library world these days:

LAST year, Christmas was the biggest single day for e-book sales by HarperCollins. And indications are that this year’s Christmas Day total will be even higher, given the extremely strong sales of e-readers like the Kindle and the Nook. Amazon announced on Dec. 15 that it had sold one million of its Kindles in each of the three previous weeks.But we can also guess that the number of visitors to the e-book sections of public libraries’ Web sites is about to set a record, too. And that is a source of great worry for publishers. In their eyes, borrowing an e-book from a library has been too easy.

Too easy? They have completely tied our hands with regards to lending eBooks. OverDrive is such a DRM racket and it's the only player on the field at the moment. There is so little available for library patrons and it's so hard to get to.

*angry noise*

Check out some of the comments on Slashdot. I like this one:

Authors and editors are valuable, but publishers are basically parasites nowadays.

eBook Review: Barnyard Dance

Stomp your feet and clap your hands! Everybody ready for a Barnyard Dance!

When Sandra Boynton tells us to stomp and clap, we say HOW LOUD?  We took this eBook for a swing around the pigpen on our brand spanking new Galaxy Nexus.  We chose the "The big guy reads it" option, which is much more fun than the "I want to read it myself" option because it's sung the whole way through.  If you don't do your pauses right it can feel awkward. I find this with a lot of Sandra Boynton's work, but it's sacrilegious to say such things in public so I keep my big trap shut most of the time.  Trust me- it's better to have some lightly animated cow read it to you so it's done right.

Extras included dancing bovines, ungulates and fowl (bowing, spinning, bouncing, walking in a line), interactive foliage, tilt-sensor egg shells and animal sounds galore.  I found the pages a little hard to turn, especially for little fingers.  You have to be very precise with your swiping, and it's too easy to hit the "do it again" button instead.  At the end of the book there is a deck of cards with covers from other Boynton books, which I assumed would take me to the Market so I could purchase them too, but that was not the case.  Take my money, darnit!

You can see a trailer of this eBook here.

eBook Review: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

I love free stuff.  And this eBook was free from the Amazon App Store.  This eBook is best enjoyed with a big mug full of rum-spiked eggnog.  Or something a little stronger.

There are 3 options for this one: Auto Play, Read to Me and Read it Myself.  I did the Read to Me option, and I managed to be only slightly heebie-jeebied by the talking snowman.

You can click on the illustrations once creepy snowman dude stops narrating and you are rewarded with the spoken and written identification of whatever object you tapped.  Not enough of the objects are labeled, however.  I would have gotten a kick out of hearing the snowman say "Reindeer Butt."

This nostalgic tale of stymied conformity contains vocabulary like "Red Schnoz" and a suspiciously gay-looking elf named Hermey who hates making toys and wants to be a dentist.  Rudolph and Hermey run away from home and encounter a prospector named Yukon Cornelius; the Abominable Snow Monster; and King Moonracer (the flying lion who rules the land of the misfit toys).  The plot is nutty, the characters fickle and there is a terrible ripping sound effect as Hermey the gay dentist elf extracts the Abominable Snow Monster's teeth (after he dropped a huge chunk of ice on its head).

What on earth were they on when they made this?   I LOVE it!!!  But I will NOT be reading it with my progeny until he's old enough to discuss concepts like narrative structure.  Or the lack thereof.

 (I couldn't make this stuff up, it's too good!)

eBook Review: A Charlie Brown Christmas

It's Christmas Eve, y'all!  I took the plunge and shelled out some actual dough to buy A Charlie Brown Christmas.  I am glad I did.  For my hard-earned money I got to witness my favourite melancholy youngster bemoaning his lack of Christmas cheer, then finding it again by being whacked on the head with a little religion (yeah, it's a little heavy handed, but I'm trying not to be all Scrooge McDuck about it).

Extras included a game of collecting Christmas ornaments throughout the book, snowflakes that go POP and crystalize, and pop-up style characters that do funny things like sigh or wiggle when you tap them.  There is also finger painting, piano playing, angry-birds style snowball throwing and Lucy saying "Look Charlie, Let's face it. We all know that Christmas is a big commercial racket!"

I had fun clicking on words to make the bored sounding computer voice make sentences that made no sense, and Little J really got the hang of turning pages.

Spring for this App, snuggle up with your kid and be jolly, eBook style.

Happy Whatever Holiday You Celebrate When It Gets Cold, everyone!

iTunes
Android 

eArticle review: Digital literacy crucial early in life, educators say

Faith Rogow, the founding president of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, which we looked at a little here made a presentation recently at an Early Childhood Education conference put on by the Pittsburg Association for the Education of Young Children.  The Tribune Review wrote a nice little article about it here.

In this new world, "what does it mean to be literate?" Rogow asked the 200 teachers attending the daylong symposium on Friday. 

Reading and writing are part of the answer, she said. But so is the ability to navigate the new media landscape. For early education teachers, it means preparing youngsters "for the world they actually live in," Rogow said -- the world of interactive, instant communication and information-gathering.

This conference was aimed at early childhood educators, but many of the programs were presented by librarians.  Check out the conference brochure.  I wish I could have been there!  I am contacting a few of the presenters to pick their brains and find out when they will next be speaking somewhere on my side of the continent. 


Programs I would have loved to have sat in on:
There's an App for That: Selecting Quality Children's Books in E-book Format by Tess Reismeyer
The Library Online Playground by Caralee Sommerer & Megan Fogt
Using Media & Technology Tools in the Early Childhood Classroom by Michael Robb

Touch and Go eBook Reviews

School Library Journal provides all sorts of reviews for all sorts of good stuff, but what's really exciting is their Touch and Go blog, which reviews apps and eBooks for kids and teens.   I usually look at the Preschool-Grade 4 posts, and there are quite a few holiday titles reviewed on there at the moment.  Often the products reviewed are not available for free, but they're not prohibitively expensive.  I'm even tempted to buy A Charlie Brown Christmas for the Galaxy Tab, even for $6.99.  One pet peeve about this blog is that they don't have links to the marketplace for the items, so you have to do all that pesky copying, pasting and searching to take a gander at what they're talking about.

eBook Review: Mud Puddle

Title: Mud Puddle

Author: Robert Munsch

Illustrator: Sami Suomalainen

Narrator: Robert Munsch

Publisher: Annick Press

Provider: TumbleBooks

Age: K-3

Robert Munsch is a multi-talented fellow.  He writes funny books that keep both little monsters and little mamas entertained, and then he narrates said books with aplomb.  This book is about a little girl who gets dressed in her nice clean clothes and plays innocently in her backyard.  A  mud puddle jumps on her head numerous times, and excessive bathing and dressing ensue until Jule Ann puts the smack down on the mud puddle with 2 bars of stinky yellow soap.  Munsch's bathtime sound effects are hilarious.  I will use them the next time a mud puddle jumps on Little J and I need to scrub him down. 

I tried the word search game that's included with this TumbleBook, and I was really disappointed.  You are given a sentence from the book and asked to fill in the word, and if the word you type is incorrect it says something like "You're an idiot!  Do you want to try again?" and your answer, of course, is "No, I don't want to try again, I want to cry."  I think Tumblebooks is trying to get on board the interactivity wagon but hasn't quite gotten there yet.