Story Builder is designed to be a fun way to improve learners’ ability to create narratives. The app’s goal is to improve paragraph formation, idea integration, and higher level abstractions. These goals are accomplished through three levels of play with an easy-to-use recorder to record learner narratives. Later, the app merges the learner’s recorded answers into a larger narrative. With over 50 storylines and 500 questions to guide the narrative, learners have the opportunity to create lots of different stories. Story Builder is particularly useful for special needs learners with sensory processing disorders or those on the autism spectrum, as it includes extensive use of audio clips.

Website: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id377631532

What Users Love About the App

“This is a very good app for using with elementary aged students who need to work on generating sentences or stories and answering questions. The student is able to record their voice so that they can then listen to their own sentences and discuss their performance.”

“There are a lot of ways this app can be used by teachers and therapists. It can easily be used with general education students as well as students with varying disabilities. This app is definitely worth the money.”

“I am very impressed with this app and the responsiveness of the company to my suggestions for improvements. It is truly unique. In my practice I use this app to work toward a wide variety of goals.”

“It’s great for practicing creating sentences and organizing verbal narrative. I also use it to help others improve articulation, fluency, voice, and word retrieval. I am glad that there are options to turn on and off the initial voice with each new picture- some people find it distracting.”

“The recording quality is fantastic and the process is easy. I like being able to save the recordings to document progress. The pictures are colorful and engaging. This app is a great way to work at the sentence and conversational levels and to promote carryover with both kids and adults.”

What Users Dislike About the App

“I love the idea of this app but it could use some improvements. One of the picture prompts had fireworks and asked what day of the year it was. To anyone who is unfamiliar with Independence Day, this would be a confusing question, and that’s the reaction I noticed.”

“I feel like the picture cues and questions could be improved by having some more baseline experiences represented. I’m having better luck creating story boards on pinterest and developing my own questions than using this app for language development with underexposed children.”

“My only complaint is that you cannot scroll through the story cards, or end a story without closing the app (at least, we haven’t figured out how yet). It would be helpful to see them all on a thumbnail screen, or at least be able to move to another easily if found to be too “easy” or not relevant enough for my son to contextualize.”

“I found the pictures to be a bit too abstract for my son’s needs. Will look forward to additional content and possibly the use of photos”

“I feel like it is geared more towards higher functioning kids. It would promote imagination. However, for a beginning learner, in my case it was a four year old with autism, it was difficult for him to come up with answers to the questions and I was prompting him through it.”