DALLAS, TX  (May 4, 2012) – Award-winning educational mobile app company, Smarty Ears  has released four innovative educational apps, Fun and Functional, Categories Learning Center, Go-Together, and Learning Adventures, that were designed to effectively aid in improving children’s language and speech communication skills. In addition, the apps enable teachers, parents, and speech therapists to utilize these convenient tools to enhance their sessions and tailor each treatment for each student’s specific needs.   Designed by Speech-Language Pathologists, Nichole Hanneken Ontis and Danielle Sears, Language Adventures is a theme-based game board that incorporates standard game play settings such as dice rolling, token moving, and player selection. This exciting app helps children develop vocabulary, naming, and description in the context of a real-world setting such as the classroom, cafeteria, and playground. With its exciting interface and colorful graphics, this visually appealing app can be used by multiple players with different skill levels and target goals. “I have personally used Language Adventures with students in 6^th through 12^th grade. The students are very excited to use the app and frequently ask to play it!” said co-author, Nichole Hanneken Ontis, “The app set-up makes it easy enough for students to learn while playing independently in a small group, yet allows endless opportunities for the therapist or teacher to build on the context-based questions to increase learning opportunities for increasing language skills. The data tracking within the app has allowed me to track their increased progress over sessions and has made it easier as a therapist to collect data and be involved in the app use. Having the 3 level game boards and hundreds of target words has made this app a great therapy tool that can be used over many sessions without the students getting bored with it.” Fun and Functional and Go-Together were both authored by SLP, Rosie Simms and were created to improve language comprehension and expression in children. Fun and Functional helps children to identify and describe how real-world objects function, thus strengthening their language and life skills while Go-Together targets categories of items and helps children to identify objects with a semantic association. These customizable apps effectively measures receptive activity and can be used by individuals in all age groups.   The fourth app recently released by Smarty Ears, Categories Learning Center helps students build their memory, word retrieval, and vocabulary skills which are vital for them to effectively listen, speak, read, and write. Authored by Barbara and Mary Huston, Categories Learning Center increases receptive and expressive vocabulary through picture stimuli and aids individuals with category naming and category selections.   “Through sorting items into categories and subcategories – for example, not just animals, but also ‘animals that live on a farm,’ children can develop key word networks that help them learn and retrieve vocabulary words,” stated Sean Sweeney, Production Development Manager for Smarty Ears. “Categories are everywhere in our world, and though students with language difficulties struggle with verbal organization, this app provides an engaging way to work on these skills…”   All four apps, which are currently available in the iTunes apps store, can be used with an iPad, running on IOS 4.0 higher. Fun and Functional and Go-Together are also compatible with the iPhone and iPod Touch. The prices of these easy-to-use apps range from $9.99 to $19.99.   For more information about Fun and Functional, Categories Learning Center, Go-Together, Learning Adventures and other Smarty Ears products, visit smartyearsapps.com or contact Smarty Ears at [email protected].  

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