Full Disclosure: I was sent a copy of this app for the purpose of a review.
It's been a while since I've done an app review, but I'm glad I started back with Shake-a-Phrase by Artgig Studios. Shake-a-Phrase is a fun app thats purpose is helping with parts of speech by using crazy and funny sentences. It is a wonderful idea that kids will have a great time using. It can be downloaded on the iPad or iPhone/iTouch.
Break Down:
There are three different parts to the app.
You can use the Shake it! This will create random sentences that the user can read and select words to get the definition and the part of speech it belongs to. It is a very simple part of the app that is tons of fun. The sentences were silly, but easy to understand. They might not make a ton of sense at times, but that really isn't the point. The picture on the iPad is very clean and the words are easy to read. It really is a great UI for all ages.
If you are looking for students to write stories of their own, consider using the Story Starter part of the app. The Story Starter starts the user off with a crazy sentence and leaves the rest up to the imagination.
This is a fabulous example of starting a story in the classroom. The kids could have a field day with this type of starter. My mind actually raced for a bit as I thought of crazy extras to add to this story. This is wonderful for a teacher looking to get students writing creatively.
Lastly, there is the Quiz Me! portion of the app. The Quiz Me! portion of the app places a silly sentence on the screen and asks the user to identify verbs, nouns or adjectives. It worked very well and I made it to level 11until I moved on to other parts of the app. The difficulty increased as I moved along and I could see kids challenging each other for bragging rights on who went the farthest.
Another cool feature of the app is the ability to choose different themes. There are 5 different themes:
Shake Starter will provide random sentence goodness and Animals, Fairytale, Monsters and their new theme, Sports. The sentences match up to their respective themes and are fun to use. You can see that I really liked the monster theme. The little boy in me just found them too funny not to use. The new sports theme is just as solid as the others and I look forward to more themes being added over time.
Extras:
The app has a couple of extras that I really like. The Fave button allows the user to store their favorite sentences and the share button allows the user to email the shake screen to a friend. I have already emailed one crazy sentence to Tim.
Overall:
I really like this app and think it can be used by teachers in the classroom. The UI s fabulous and the app looks amazing on the iPad2. Everything was crystal clear.
The Themes were fun and refreshing and always creative. I went through over 100 shakes and I never saw a duplicate sentence. I looked weird as I sat there shaking my iPad, but I always had a new sentences to read.
Sharing the sentence and saving them for later was just a simple tap of the screen.
I can see the iPad being connected to a projector and students having a blast as they try to finish the stories started or point out the nouns, verbs and adjectives in the wacky sentences.
For $1.99, I think it is a steal. I would recommend that teachers pick up this app and share it with their students. It can be used together as a class or by individual students.
Shake-a-Phrase is a great app that will keep students laughing and learning.
- @TheNerdyTeacher
Sounds like a fun app indeed. Thanks for the review, Nicholas
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