Personalised Storybook Maker For iPad

Kid in Story Book Maker by Locomotive Labs is an iPad app for children, adults and educators, to use together to create stories. It is more than just a plain-text page turner, or even a visually simple App such as reading book in the iBooks Application. Kid in Story Book Maker will allow you to insert the image of the young one into the story and then you can record voice-over narrations for each individual page.

It’s your own personal storybook maker that can be used for creative writing/storytelling or more focused instruction by educators and speech-language therapists.  The general purpose of Kid in Story Book Maker is the ability to create a truly personalized story experience.

The developers have also created tutorial videos to act as walkthroughs, although the process is relatively easy. The templates make it simple for you to get started, but currently there are not many choices. The developers at Locomotive Labs invite users to share their original stories, so hopefully the Kid in Story template library will grow.

The user also has the option to create a story from scratch, but, obviously that process is a more involved.  First of all you need a framework of a story in place, then you can start building the pages. You can take pictures from your own photo library or take an image of your child as the story is created.

The app applies Image-detection technology, which isolates only the child and then superimposes his or her portrait onto the page of the story. Sound can also be added to narrate the page and text may be added or edited into the story pages.  You can however only have one narrative per page and it has to be simple, by generating a longer or more complex narrative is a problem and this can be an issue for children with speech and language problems.  The stories you create can be shared via email or Dropbox.

The story is saved as a Kid In Story book file (.kis) and requires the recipient of the file to have an iPad with Kid in Story App installed.  The story also can be sent as a PDF file, but the audio narration will be lost in the conversion.  The Kid in Story Book Maker app is a useful tool for preschool and elementary-aged children, since the app can be used with children who are having difficulty reading or who avoid reading activities.

The user can control the text, this allows a great deal of flexibility towards the content and complexity of the story being written.  The Kid in Story app also is being used by educators and parents to teach specific skills to a child or children. Some of these can include teaching linguistic concepts and other early academic concepts. It can even be used as an activity to facilitate speech sound articulation skills at the phrase, sentence or paragraph level.

Kid in Story Book Maker by Locomotive Labs is available in the iOS App Store.

[Image via locomotivelabs]

SOURCE: http://www.tuaw.com/2013/08/09/kid-in-story-is-a-personalized-story-creator-for-children/