4.9
Where to Buy

Write About This App Review

App Info

Price: $3.99

Overview

Write About This offers hundreds of motivating and interesting writing prompts as well as systems to create new prompts, add other content, write and share writing, record and work collaboratively. It is a highly useful and flexible tool for home or classroom to encourage children to write.

Features include:

  • 125 pictures with 3 levels of prompts for each (full version)
  • Free and paid versions available
  • Record and save narration
  • Search pictures and prompts
  • Save and share student writing
  • Allow collaboration among students
  • Publish to PDF
  • Optional voiced prompts
  • Use your own content
  • Modify existing content
  • Optional built-in spell check

 

Quality

Write About This is an outstanding collection of open-ended writing prompts that will have most students eager to write again and again. The software allows searching or choices by category, or pictures can be selected at random. Each picture comes with prompts at three levels of difficulty. It’s easy to add your own content and to save or share student work.

Education

This awesome app will be an outstanding addition to elementary classrooms, great for home practice, and very useful for special education settings. The app provides over 100 colorful and engaging photos to write about, each with three levels of writing prompt built in. The app can optionally read prompts to users, and stories can be recorded orally or written down. It’s easy to add your own custom-designed prompts for the included pictures or to add your own content and create completely new items, saving them to the appropriate category so they would be searchable later. This means that even students could create their own unique blend of content.

The three levels of writing prompts could be useful in a number of different ways. The easiest level offers very personal writing suggestions, such as putting yourself into the situation, making lists or similar exercises. The second level gets into speculation about aspects of the photograph, and the third builds reasoning and similar skills as students are encouraged to write more detailed essays. The three levels provide enough flexibility that the system is useful for students from the earliest stages of elementary school through grades five or six, and beyond for students needing remedial work or by using the custom design feature.

The app also has the ability to make audio recordings to attach to projects. This means that even the youngest authors could create their stories with little adult assistance, then have some help later to write them down. It also opens up a number of multi-media options for older students’ projects.

Entertainment

Write About This has an astounding array of vivid, exciting photographs to form the basis for the built-in writing prompts. These are categorized and searchable. In addition, the ability to create addition content is a wonderful tool. Users can get visuals from their device’s memory or use the built-in pictures and create new prompts for students to see or hear.

Users have options to save completed work in a gallery, to email it or to save it to the camera roll and include it in other types of digital projects. This creates an endless array of possibilities for assignments and learning tasks. There’s literally no end to the creative possibilities.

Value

Simply having access to such an array of high-quality pictures and writing prompts would make this a high-value app all by itself, but when you add in the flexibility and the capability to add your own pictures and prompts or to create new prompts for included pictures, you have a powerful set of tools for teaching and practicing writing. Great value here! You could spend much more on photo prompts and not find as good of a collection, and the extra features make the cost amazingly low.

Child Friendliness

Write About This has no outside advertising and no in-app purchases. Students can easily access the email links, though, when they complete a project. This feature should perhaps be a bit more protected, with possibly an option in settings to enable or disable it. The settings section does contain a mechanism to assign a default email address so that things sent by students all go to an assigned email address. This is easily changed in the settings section, though, which children can access.

The information/parents section to the app is hidden but unprotected. Within that section, there are links to the App Store and Twitter, as well as email options for telling friends or contacting developers. The link to the app’s website opens the browser and would allow children access to the internet.

Write About This
Write About This
Write About This is an outstanding app for teaching and practicing writing skills. It’s great for a very wide range of ages and abilities, and will provide hours and hours of productive practice.
Quality
Education
Entertainment
Value
Child Friendly
4.9
Where to Buy