Listening Power Preschool App Review
App Info
Price: $19.99
Overview
Listening Power Preschool HD is a receptive language program designed for preschoolers. It provides leveled practice with receptive language skills including listening to descriptions, listening to directions, listening for grammar, listening to stories with pictures and listening to stories without pictures. The app features many ways to customize the experience, it can be used with multiple individuals or groups, and it can collect data for school, IEP, or other programs that need documentation.
Features include:
- Five activities with three levels of difficulty each
- Capability to adjust question difficulty automatically or manually
- Flexible task structure with many options to individualize
- Text and sound can be turned on or off
- Activities can be responsive and adjust to student success or difficulty
Quality
Listening Power Preschool HD is an outstanding app suitable for preschoolers, special needs students, and young speech/language students. The app is very well-designed for its purpose and works without any problems whatsoever. Furthermore, the developers have included an outstanding tutorial and adult information section that clearly explain the app’s many features and provide suggestions for use in an array of settings. It is easy to set up student profiles, to create groups, and to use the data gathered for documentation for school or other formal programs.
Education
Listening Power Preschool HD was designed by a speech-language pathologist and it shows. The app is very well designed for its purposes and will benefit countless young children. There are five educational activities included, each with three levels of difficulty available. Users listen for grammar, listen to descriptions, listen to directions, listen to stories with pictures and listen to stories without pictures. Each of these exercises presents a task and multiple choices to complete the item, though the adult mentor can choose to have the answer choices appear automatically or can delay their appearance to allow students to generate their own responses first. The app is loaded with features that allow detailed customization for different students or groups of students, including the capability to control the number of answer choices, the level of difficulty, the responsiveness of the app (whether or not it presents more challenging exercises when students are successful or simpler exercises when students make several errors in a row), and whether or not to gather data on a student’s performance. There is even an option to present only missed items on the next lesson!
The app is perfect for receptive language development and practice, and can also be used for reading comprehension by turning the narration off and the text on for the stories. There are 75 stories in each of the story activities, so there is lots and lots of material available without getting repetitious. Teachers or parents can even print out the stories for use in other ways with the students, so the app really adds a lot of educational punch in many areas.
Entertainment
Listening Power Preschool HD is very well-designed to capture and hold the interest of young children. The graphics are simple, colorful, and interesting. Each exercise is rewarded with a random animation or sound when completed correctly, and adult users can control the frequency of appearance of a rewarding game between activity sets. The reward can be turned off entirely, or set to appear after 1, 3, 5, 8, 10 or 15 exercises.
Value
This app is obviously intended for professional use, since it can accommodate up to 75 students and group them, as well as gather, print or email detailed performance data suitable for documentation of the effectiveness of formal programs, but the app is also a great value for parents of preschoolers, particularly preschoolers who are struggling with their language or academic development, or who are at risk for falling behind. It costs $19.99 in the App Store, but it has immense educational value and play value. Children will be able to use it for several years and would benefit from the exercises provided.
Child Friendliness
This app has all outside links protected with an effective parent gate.
- Parent area (contains protected email links)
- NO social media
- NO in-app purchase
- NO 3rd party ads
- YES more apps links (protected but visible)
