ToDo Telling Time

[appimg 666462848]

App Info

Price: [app 666462848] {price}

AppStore User Rating: {stars}[/app]

Overview

Todo Telling Time is a comprehensive app that helps students practice telling time to the hour, half hour, five minute intervals, and minutes.  Todo Telling Time has activities that support calendar and schedule skills, and it also provides practice with foundational skills such as number recognition and order, counting by fives, elapsed time, and estimation of time.

Features include:

• Six games
• Three to five levels of play in each game
• Supports Common Core Math Standards in grades 1 through 3
• Progress records available for user
• Assessment activity

Quality

Todo Telling Time offers several well-designed exercises that will help young children or special needs students practice vital skills related to time.  Animations and sounds support the game play, and the home screen has a clock that shows the current day and time, as well as a background that changes appropriately to match the time of day shown on the clock.  For example, when the clock hands are moved to 9:00 PM, the background gets dark and streetlights come on.  The sun rises and sets, and the calendar page changes the date at midnight. Nice touches!

Education

This app covers all the bases for instruction in time and calendar skills.  The six games include leveled opportunities to tell time on analog and digital clocks, memory exercises, calendar and daily schedule activities, as well as support for counting by fives and developing an understanding of elapsed time. There is a Quiz activity where users can test their knowledge.  Records of which games and levels have been accessed, as well as the total amount of time the user has spent with the app, are available for one user.

Most of the games have five levels of difficulty, and it is possible to skip the easy ones if a student has already mastered them and is not interested in playing through.  The increasing difficulty between levels is appropriate, and most of the activities include helpful cuing systems to guide students who are struggling a bit.  For example, one activity requires players to assemble the dates for the month on a calendar.  The individual date squares have a background that forms a picture when they are assembled in the correct order.  The clock face used for the scheduling activity has regular clock numbers 1-12, but in the border around the clock face, it also includes the counting by fives numbers that aid in reading the minutes.

It would be nice if this app could keep records for multiple users-it would make it a lot more useful in classroom settings.

Entertainment

This app is quite cute, with many entertaining touches that will appeal to young children.  The home screen shows a scene that changes with the time of day (or when someone manipulates the clock hands), and a few of the pictures respond with short animations when touched.  The mascot character reads the time currently shown on the clock when touched.

It would be nice to have a way to turn off the background music if needed.  It’s fairly repetitious and if someone didn’t like it or found it distracting, it could be troublesome.  It would also be helpful to have a “reset” button for the main clock shown on the home screen that would put it back to the current time and day.  If a child were to play with it much, it would be tough for the user to reset it correctly.

The amusement park theme is well done, but could be perceived as juvenile for special needs students.  The app does such a good job of teaching subskills related to time that developers might want to consider doing more to target this audience.  Many older students with special needs would benefit from the concepts covered, but might balk at the music and imagery.

Value

This app is a good value even though it costs a bit more than others.  The attention to detail and well-designed sequence of learning make it a great way to reinforce time concepts for children in kindergarten through second or third grade.

Child Friendliness

Todo Telling Time is child-friendly.  There are no advertisements or in-app purchases.  There is a protected Parents’ Area, but it is easy to enter, especially by children who can read just a little bit (the written instruction is “slide”).  Inside the Parents’ Area, there are links to social media as well as links that open the device’s browser and could potentially connect young children with the internet.  It would be better to make the Parents’ Area more difficult for young children to access by accident or without supervision.