Writing TherAppy – App Review

by admin | Aug 27, 2012 | Apps

The iMums (one of my favourite reviewers) reviewed Writing TherAppy by Tactus Solutions.

The App is designed by a speech – language therapist for people with impaired written expression abilities. This includes adults with brain injury as well as children learning to spell. Grace (an iMum) reported “recently I found an unlikely spelling app that will help my 5 year old progress from his cutesy beginner spelling apps to handling future spelling dictation in a formal school setting.”

Developer: Tactus Therapy Solutions Ltd.

Price: $19.99

Writing TherAppy has 4 learning modes and each has 3 levels of difficulty

Fill-In-The-Blank – the spelling word has 1 or 2 missing letters (depending on level of difficulty) and the student has to select the missing letter(s) from a limited choice or all the letters of the alphabet.

Copy – move the letters into the appropriate blank spaces to copy the word given.

Spell What You See (Naming) – spell the name of the pictured noun.  You can hear the word by touching the picture.

Spell What You Hear (Dictation) – spell the spoken word without any pictorial clue.

There are also hints on each level to allow success on each trial.

The spelling words are categorized into 12 categories: animals, body parts, clothing, colours, concepts, food, furnishings, numbers, objects, people, places and sports.  The categories can be edited and custom spelling words can be added so that the child can practice spelling words given by the school.

App Review Checklist & Rating Chart: Total Score   /20

Speech/Language/Education Apps

Total 12/20 points

Star Rating

5 Stars 17 – 20 points

4 Stars 13 – 16 points

3 Stars 9 -12 points

2 Stars 5 – 8 points

1 Star 0 -4 points

App Strengths

• A British or American accent is an option in the settings which is great for our South African children. The sound quality is crisp and clear.
• Self –checking is encouraged because the student is encouraged to tap the “Check” button in order to submit his answers.
• The “hints” allow the student to go down to a lower level of difficulty whenever he needs additional help. There are two types of “hints”, depending on an activity’s chosen level of difficulty:  one is that it removes several foils and narrows the student’s letter options down.  Tapping on the Hint button can also put a letter in the first box of the target word, cueing the user with what letter the word starts with.
• The Written Naming is an excellent activity to work on word retrieval
• The Spell What-You-Hear allows the student to replay the word as often as he wants. The therapist/teacher can be alerted to auditory discrimination difficulties.
•  Upper or lower case letters can be used.
• You can adjust the settings starting from 10 trials and you can adjust the word difficulty based on length of the word.
• Because the words are categorized into themes, it promotes good interaction between the therapist and client and allows for development of categorization and language skills.
• You can create customized spelling lists that are specific to the student. (There is a downside to this)

 Areas for improvement

• The app does not allow for data storage and transfer from session to session
• Although you can grade the word in terms of number of letters in the word, you cannot adjust the word according to phonemic difficulty and the app would be far more valuable to children with spelling/auditory processing difficulties.
• The Fill-In-The-Blank activity takes out random letters. An option for taking out specific letter positions would allow better customization to a child’s difficulty level.
• Although the Written Naming can be used to work on word retrieval, by tapping the picture, the word is revealed. Phonemic (sound) cueing or a grapheme (letter) cue would add a therapeutic dimension to this activity.
• It does not allow you to make a customized list without adding a picture. This is a problem especially if you are using your child’s spelling list
• Although the pictures are clear and realistic, the children that I have used it with were not engaged or motivated by this app.
• Even though there is quantity (in terms of the number of words), I feel that the price is a bit steep for what it offers.

I feel that this App is probably great for the children who are learning to spell and have no underlying difficulties or for adults who have had a brain injury.

However, for children who have auditory perceptual difficulties or difficulty learning to spell, the lack of gradation is a problem and I feel that it is rather expensive as a “Naming App.”

If you have found a useful spelling app, I would really like to know about it.