Kids A-Z

The app is pretty much useless without the leveled books. The new update doesn’t consider user experience at all. At lease add a search function so one can find a book by its title, and label the books with levels. Better yet, just roll it back and make leveled books available again!

I have been using the app for a few years now. Initially introduced by the school district, now I pay for the plus subscription. It has been a wonderful tool until the recent upgrade. While the aim of the new upgrade might have been for students to access to a collection of books at their grade level and support the needs of both teachers and students, the new upgrade fails to consider that even at the same grade level, a level G book may have different requirement for vocabulary, word counts, plot understanding and concept understanding than a level K book. The level of performance and understanding for a child who just enters the 3rd grade would be very different from the same child at the end of the 3rd grade. Hence by giving a hodgepodge of books claimed to be“at their grade level", the new upgrade cannot pinpoint for teachers and kids to know exactly where the needs are. The new upgrade thus loses the advantage of tracking the exact level for teachers and students. If a student happens to choose a more difficult book in the grade level, reading can be daunting and frustrating; and if he/she chooses a very easy book at the grade level, he/she won’t be challenged. The just right amount of challenge for learning is completely lost in the new upgrade. And I don’t see why teachers and parents would continue to use the program vs just getting Kindle books. And in all honesty, without the new upgrade, I was happily paying and using the program. And the previous program with the leveled books icon already supported the needs for growth for students and they are reading at their grade level. I don’t see where exactly this upgrade have improved and it feels more like a downgrade for efficiency of locating a book at students’ true reading level vs a gross grade level where you don’t know exactly how many words and home much vocabulary they could handle.