Description

From the creator of ArtikPix comes an exciting and interactive story comprehension app called StoryPals.

“It’s just as important to greet friends with fresh breath as it is to defend the castle,” Cricket exclaimed to Drake the Dragon in “Drake’s Bad Breath.” Children can’t help but crack a smile or have a chuckle as they practice listening and reading comprehension with StoryPals in this engaging story comprehension app. StoryPals features 24 original stories with stunning, colorful artwork that are whimsical and highly interactive. But that’s not all: StoryPals goes well beyond your typical reading comprehension app!

StoryPals has several features that make it versatile and robust. The included stories can be read independently, read aloud with professional narrations, or read aloud using high quality Acapela text-to-speech with word highlighting. Each story is accompanied by a vivid illustration that supports the meaning of the story via a variety of slick interactions that come to life with entertaining voiceovers and sound effects. Following each story is a 10 question quiz containing WH questions (who, what, where, when, why) to assess story comprehension. You can easily track student progress of comprehension goals with automatic scoring for individual students or a small group, and export scores for access outside the app.

"It is exciting to see an app for comprehension come to the market created by professionals with the background and experience to understand literacy and language," says Bridget Gilormini, speech-language pathologist. StoryPals is co-authored by a speech-language pathologist and a language arts teacher who have a significant understanding of individualizing curriculum to help students meet comprehension goals. As a result, StoryPals offers optimal flexibility, allowing users to configure options within included stories and quizzes to allow students to practice listening and reading comprehension at the appropriate level. Plus, you can create your own stories and quizzes to target specific literacy skills for students with various needs. Since you can also share stories and quizzes with your pals, it is easy to build a library of stories and quizzes so your students always have new content to explore.

StoryPals includes the following features:
- 24 included, original stories ranging in readability levels 2-6
- Configurable text size (small, medium, large, extra large) and justification
- Text-to-speech with word highlighting for reading support
- For My Stories, voice recordings are appended within each story
- Real-time configurable options for animations, text-to-speech, word highlighting, pronunciations, readability levels, quizzes (number of answer choices, types of questions, etc.), backup/restore from backup and more.
- Take multiple choice quizzes and create your own with text-to-speech
- Utilize automatic group scoring to collect scores on WH questions for a group of students
- Save scores automatically in the app or export them to clipboard and email
- Stunning, colorful illustrations optimized for all generations of iPad
- Tap and drag images to enable fun animations
- Create stories using illustrations that animate and/or photos plus text
- Automatically save created stories and read them with text-to-speech
- Share stories with quizzes via iTunes File Sharing or email attachments
- Additional free stories with quizzes at http://ericsailers.com/blog.html
- Accessibility support via VoiceOver

Since your privacy is everything, StoryPals stands by the following:
- No information collected by the developer
- No ads
- No in-app purchases
- No push notifications
- No social media integration
- No location data

What's New in Version 1.1.2

- Bug fixes

What's New in Version 1.1.1
- iOS 6 support for Text-to-Speech and photos
- Bug fixes

What's New in Version 1.1
- Professional narrations added to Included Stories
- Improved voice recording feature for My Stories
- Increased volume for animation sounds
- Improved word highlighting for text-to-speech in stories
- Improved spacing in stories
- Added configurable option for edit mode
- Added configurable option to display recording first in stories
- Multi-select feature of illustration elements when creating My Stories
- Text to Speech pronunciation improvements for a few titles in the Included Stories
- Voice recordings for My Stories are now shared via email attachment or iTunes File Sharing
- Bug fixes