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Welcome to EdTech Tuesday, I'm Rich Dixon. And I'm Jennifer Gibson, and today we're going
to look at an app called Shout Science! with an exclamation point - as you're looking for
it in the app iTunes Store, you want to make sure you put that in there - and this is a
fun app. Let's take a look. Let's dive in. Go ahead and launch that, and let's talk about
price and give us an overview. Price is free, yay! That's a good thing. It's so fun. And
I want to make sure you know that the review today is based on version 1.2, so I think
this is a great place to start. They call this a comic storybook app, and it's really
going to focus on the Scientific Revolution. There are three stories that they have in
this app. It's not a comprehensive science app, but it does focus on a period of time.
If you're teaching that period of time, what a great resource to have, especially because
it's free! We know that writing and literacy and pulling that into all subject areas, no
matter what you teach, is an important aspect of standards these days. It looks like this
might be something that could attend to that. Let's take a closer look. First of all, we
click on Start and what we're going to see is just this beautiful map of what took place
and where these events took place in that time period. There's also some really nice
background music that plays along with the app; it's very soothing. On the right side,
you're going to find this timeline of some important people during the Scientific Revolution
and also you're going to find some things that you can click on. Rich, if you want to
click on one of these. Sure, I'll click on Robert Hooke and the microscope, let's see
what we get here. Some of these, it looks to me like he's going to add more, but right
now you need to click on the ones that say Read More. That's a helpful thing. Go ahead
and click on that. Let's check out Maria. You'll see where this took place, you can
see some activities. I can read her story, it looks like. I'll try that. What I love
about this is the illustrations. I think a lot of time and effort was put into the illustrations,
and there are some animations but they're not distracting, they're just very lightweight.
Let's take a closer look. So you're gonna scroll on down. The age group that you're
going to see right here is about seven through 11 - younger readers - but it could still
be a value for some of the older readers who are maybe working on English as a second language
or just need some remediation in reading. It sounds like it's adaptable for a number
of different populations. I can go through and read the story. There's not a lot of interactivity
within the story itself other than the bit of animation that you saw. The story continues
and you can keep clicking through the pages and it will reload. You get the whole idea
of what she did. When you're done you can click back to the home button. It takes you
back to the map. You can click on places, you can see a little bit of animation here.
Basically the app goes through the stories of three of the people from this time period.
I think it could easily be added, that they add in more stories, it just hasn't happened
at this point in time. It doesn't look like there's any in-app purchases, but I always
do like to point that out because I know that some teachers are sensitive if they only have
a limited number of iPads, or even if there's 1:1, having the option for students to make
a decision for an in-app purchase. I like to highlight that because teachers need to
know whether or not to anticipate that issue. This one, I have not seen any in-app purchases
at this point in time. I do think this is a great app. It's not going to be something
that you use year-round necessarily, it could be part of a reading station, though. I do
see it going along very nicely with a science curriculum. Another thing that I think is
really attractive about this is it has a very specific targeted purpose, and I know that
apps that have that tend to do a little bit better in the classroom. Check it out on the
iTunes Store.