Rosetta Stone®, an international language education leader, has introduced a new kids division! With the launch of the Lingo Letter Sounds app, the groundbreaking company brings its skills into the world of early childhood language acquisition. We are excited to share this development with you just as much as the app, since the backing of popular linguistic educators brings even greater legitimacy to the goal of our bilingual families.

Lingo Letter Sounds combines all the basics of a fun app – adorable characters, beautiful graphics, and cute games – with effective reading and speaking practice. Kids can play with letter sounds in bubbles to improve English reading skills or use the Spanish Speak & Learn game to see if their pronunciation of common words is good enough to make the characters move and dance.

My favorite feature of this app is the sheer amount of content. Though there are just two game modes (and one toy shelf for viewing the toys you’ve earned), there are enough words to provide two hours of playing time! This is unique in the realm of free kids’ apps. Also, check out your child’s progress in the Parent Corner.

The opportunity to practice spoken Spanish with this app is resonant of Rosetta Stone’s most commonly used technology-based methods for picking up language skills. Instead of just spelling or reading words, kids speak them into the device and get immediate feedback. This is much more fun than having a parent approve of and correct their pronunciation!

Download this first release from the renowned developer and let them know that we want more like it in the future!

Find Rosetta Stone® Kids Lingo Letter Sounds in iTunes

Available for iPad and iPhone

Recommended for ages 3-6

Price: FREE

From the creators of ¡A la granja! and some of our other favorite apps, When I Grow Up/De mayor seré is a great resource in addition to being a fun app. It introduces children to all the career choices they will have as adults, and makes all of them seem equally fun with its cute graphics.

Sanoen, a Barcelona-based digital publisher, gives us six languages and five modes to choose from. Your youngest children can watch the automated version of the careers without having to touch the screen. Older kids can go from simply touching the words to basic spelling, advanced spelling, and reading complete sentences.

Whether you have boys or girls, little scientists or mini teachers, they will love finding out what’s involved in each life path, and you will love how this app teaches them to spell what they want to become!

Find When I Grow Up/De mayor seré in iTunes

Available for iPad

Recommended for ages 0-5

Price: $1.99

Check out Sanoen on Facebook and Twitter for more info about their educational apps.

Watch any gamer in action and you’ll see a firsthand demonstration of how the learning curve actually works.  Because video games can be so engaging and addictive, the challenge has become how to harness their power to facilitate and support learning.  The result is gamification in education.  This concept has enormous potential to revamp traditional teaching techniques while pushing students to reach greater levels of personal achievement.  It can also be a vehicle whose long term effect will be to create and develop a desire to learn within the student.  Gamification in education is currently enjoying rapid success at all grade levels and in a variety of academic disciplines.

Fact: over 5 million students spend 45 hours a week playing video games. Worldwide, we spend 3 billion hours a week in front of a computer or gaming device.

As our youth increase access to these devices, with the proper strategy, this can be an opportunity for us to transition our children from unproductive gaming to educational gaming.

Research has shown that in any learning situation, students are typically more engaged when they face a challenge that they feel they can meet.  Naturally, to be effective, the level of challenge should match the student’s skill level. If the task is too difficult, the student may give up quickly, and if it is too easy, the student may lose interest.  We know that students also benefit from multilevel games which become progressively more complex and challenging. Therefore, an effective game allows students the option to begin at varying levels of challenge and gradually increase the level of difficulty.  This is the heart of gamification in education.

As the use of gamification gains momentum, some nursery schools are making computer labs an integral part of their curriculum.  Using gamification to reinforce basic concepts of early childhood education has proven to be very effective and inspiring for the young students.  At the more mature end of the gamification spectrum, at a private school in Sweden, students are tasked with creating online games about themselves.  In this way they not only learn about gaming and success factors in game design, but they also gain insight into incentives and motivations which translates into corporate level business applications.

In response to the need for improved language skills, a company out of San Diego, CA called Tiny Factory has developed a multi-language learning app for iPad, called Lingual.  In its initial launch, it has taken on the challenge of language education, focusing on English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese.  The app is being test marketed to varying age levels and has received enthusiastic responses.  You can help support Tiny Factory and language education on Lingual’s kickstarter campaign through November 9th.

Check out this video to get you excited:

Adiós, Goodbye, Zai hui

Michael Sacca founded Tiny Factory in 2009. Tiny Factory is an application design and development company based in San Diego. Currently, They’re focusing on building apps for the language education community. Bilingual Child is available in the App Store, and Lingual will be released December 2012.

{Photo by  flickingerbrad}