How #appfriday paved the way for an invaluable meeting of two Moms With Apps

Our guest post this week is written by Jody Peccia of 2BME Studios, creator of 2BME Firefighter and a Mom With App from Buffalo New York. At one of our App Friday download parties, Jody met a fellow New Yorker (and educator) who ended up using Jody’s app in her local elementary school classroom. The feedback Jody received from the students, teachers and administrators is guiding the structure of their second app. 

My name is Jody Peccia of 2BME Studios and this is the story of how I met Heather Bitka, a local mom and Kindergarten teacher at Roy B. Kelley Elementary School (RBK) in Lockport, NY. Of course I must thank Lorraine Akemann, the Editor of Moms with Apps (MWA) for her Facebook post welcoming my company as Buffalo, NY based 2BME Studios to the MWA community. This simple post helped to forge an invaluable relationship between Mrs. Bitka and myself.  I don’t know why it is but as the old saying goes birds of a feather flock together, there is something about the folks here in the Buffalo, NY area that pulls us together. Mrs. Bitka responded to that post stating she was in Buffalo too, and here begins our story.

My first face to face meeting with Mrs. Bitka was on Saturday afternoon at a local restaurant for lunch, where we talked for hours about the use of the iPad in the classroom and all the great apps developed by the independent developers in the  MWA community.  We barely made it home in time to feed our families dinner. During that meeting Mrs. Bitka invited me to spend a morning with her class to see how they were using the iPad each and every day in her classroom, and give her students the opportunity to meet the people in their community who develop apps like the ones they were using every day.

I was amazed upon entering Mrs. Bitka’s classroom. It was not like any Kindergarten class room I had ever seen. Technology was everywhere around us, there was a Smart Board on the wall, a brand new iMac computer center and an iPad for each and every child. There were even QR codes plastered to the walls, in which Mrs. Bitka used to create a digital scavenger hunt for her students. I couldn’t help but think how lucky these students were to have such an innovative teacher and technologically advanced learning environment.

The class was split into their groups for center time and we were assigned to the iPad center. With the help of the Technology Aide, Ms. Carnes, we presented 2BME Firefighter to each of the four the rotating groups. What a precious gift we were given to see how each of these twenty children interacted with our app. We were able to see what they loved, what they wanted to interact with over and over again, what they had difficulties with, and what we could improve. One thing was for sure 2BME Firefighter was a definite hit with both boys and girls alike. The children then used Fotobabble to create their favorite scenes from 2BME Firefighter and tell us what they loved about it, which were later sent to me by Mrs. Bitka.

The time soon came to bid farewell to our new little friends but Mrs. Bitka had one more surprise in store for us. The school principal, Ms. Currie-Hall, and several of Mrs. Bitka’s fellow colleagues were interested in learning more about 2BME Studios, our app 2BME Firefighter and app development in general so we headed to the main lobby of RBK which looks much more like a pint sized café than a school lobby. That impromptu meeting proved to be instrumental in the future development of 2BME Studios apps. What we learned from Mrs. Bitka and her colleagues was just how creative they had to be to prove the effectiveness of the iPad in their classrooms. There are so many valuable apps on the App Store that pertained to the lessons they were teaching, but many if not all were failing to actually track  that the children using them were learning from them. Over the course of the next two hours or so several teachers dropped by our brainstorming session each leaving us with their tidbit of input as to what they would like to see in educational apps. The main focus complaint was there was no method to track what the students were learning and what skills they were improving upon. We left that day feeling a wide array of emotions, awed, and inspired for sure.

As the days and weeks have passed since that visit to RBK we have been hard at work developing our second 2BME Studios app and integrating the great feedback we received from the staff at RBK. We have scoured the standards from across the globe and are pleased to give the MWA readers a sneak peak at what we have incorporated thus far into our second title. We hope to help take the guesswork out of what skills children are mastering while using educational iOs apps such as those developed by 2BME Studios.

The greatest challenge during the design of tracking a child’s progress was that our apps rely heavily on the use of interaction and verbal communication opposed to the more traditional method of testing. Even something as simple as tracking if a child has interacted correctly with an object allows teachers, aides, and parents to gauge a child’s progression through our apps. On a final note, as parent developers 2BME Studios continues to keep you and your child’s privacy in mind ,therefore we want parents to be assured that no information is obtained, collected or shared by 2BME Studios.