Picture Packets - Phrases

My five star rating cannot be based entirely on my actual use of this app, since the instructions say it will take six months to a year for the program to complete the process of teaching a child to read and the program has only recently been released in app form. However, I used the classroom version of the program in my school and found its statements of 100% success to be quite valid. I am writing this review in response to a negative review posted for the Writing Worksheets app (the eleventh of the fourteen apps) claiming the app is worthless because it contains no instructions for how to use it. It occurred to me after responding to that particular review that it would better serve potential users of the program if I posted a similar review for all fourteen of the apps that make up this program, since none of the apps are meant to be used in isolation. The Apple App Store description for each of the fourteen apps indicates its position in the learning sequence. For app eleven, the Writing Worksheets app, to be useful, the use of ten other apps would have to have preceded it. Apparently the author of the review to which I responded skipped steps one through ten and started at step eleven - a problem easily remedied by starting at step one and not at step eleven. The reviewer also stated that no instructions were available for the app in question. This is an interesting assertion, since on the descriptive page in the Apple App Store for each of the fourteen apps there is an App Support button that, when pressed leads directly to a web page called “The Guide”. The title of the page provides a hint as to its purpose. In addition, written in red underneath “The Guide” title is the phrase “bookmark this page”. Clicking on icon image for any app on The Guide leads directly to that app’s set of instructions. Clicking on the Developer Web Site link in the App Store links to the Home page of the Center for Innovation in Education’s web site. The Guide is available there by clicking The Guide button at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the FAQ link at the very bottom of The Guide produces a set of instructions for how to create a permanent “The Guide” app for the iPad. Clicking on the Dekodiphukan book cover on the Center’s Home page also leads to The Guide app-making instructions. The classroom program from which these fourteen apps were created is an excellent program. How well the apps recreate this learning experience on the iPad remains to be seen. However, for the program to have a chance to accomplish in home-schooling environments what it has done in my classroom, it must be viewed as an actual curriculum with a beginning, middle and end, and not as a set of isolated experiences to be done at random.