About our guest reviews: 

SmartAppsforKids is one of the top review sites for kids educational apps, games and books. They strive for meticulousness and honesty in their reviews, both positive and negative. Their goal is to be the most complete source for parents and educators looking for reliable info on an app before making a purchase.

 

 

 

SmallButKindaMighty.com is a blog by Deanne Shoyer, a talented writer, educator and legal advisor. She fundraised to acquire iPads for her autistic 8 year-old twin boys in 2011 and has been an iOS addict ever since. She has reviewed apps for Smart Apps for Kids and The iMums and also reviews them on her own site. Her blog is a good resource for posts on topics as diverse as books, history, social justice and products of interest to parents. Deanne is a freelance writer and has been featured in The Good Men Project, Thinking Person's Guide to Autism, Help We've Got Kids, Technology in Education and on the blogs of app developers Tribal Nova, iStoryTime and Cupcake Digital. Her blog reached the Top 15 in Babble.com's 2012 popular vote for the top 30 autism blogs for parents and in 2013 she was voted the Circle of Moms #1 Tech Mom Blogger.

 

AppsforHomeschooling was founded by Jennifer Bogart. She has children ages infant to 10 years old & is an "app-loving, aspiring geek dedicated to helping you hunt down the best homeschooling apps". Reviews on her site include everything from Toddlers to Tweens. For homeschoolers, by a homeschooler.

 

Teachers With Apps was co-founded by Jayne Clare, a Special Education teacher, & Anne Rachel, an artist & Early Childhood educator. Their goal is to be a credible resource for quality educational apps. Created to help parents, grandparents, teachers, administrators & anyone else, wade through the vast number of  ”educational” apps being introduced on a daily basis. Founded by two lifelong educators, TWA is dedicated to the idea that quality mobile educational apps are the tools of the future but they need to be used responsibly. Not all educational apps are created equal.

The iMums – Amanda, Alison, Mary and Grace – are 4 mothers from different parts of the world dedicated to educating parents about the best digital stories, educational apps, fun games & technology products available for children. The four iMums have 11 kids among them ranging in age from 1 to 17 and bring a global perspective to their app reviews with the original iMum Amanda being from Australia, Alison is in America, Grace is from Singapore and Mary is from the UK but is currently living in America. This Australian-based blog has hundreds of reviews of family friendly iOS and MacOS apps and products.

 

 

Fun Educational Apps was founded by Nathalie van Ee, mother of 3 and always on the lookout for top educational apps to support her kids learning in a fun way! She is also the co-founder of AppStar Picks, a free app listing top reviews for kids, from a network of trusted websites. She created her site as a way to help parents, educators and teachers discover great apps. Together with her kids, they try new apps on an ongoing basis.

 

MelissaNorthway.com was founded by Melissa Northway, an author who created her first book app, Penelope the Purple Pirate, in 2011. Her site provides app and book reviews as well as featuring individuals, companies and products in the tech & book industry. Melissa is not only a children's picture book author, but she's also a mom and voted as a 2013 Circle of Moms' Top 25 Tech Moms.  She also provide reviews on her fabulous lifestyle website www.dandelionmoms.com.

 

AppAbled.com is run by Teriann and Julie-Anne, a pair of busy Mums with 7 children between them! Based on opposite sides of the world, Teriann is Australian and Julie-Anne lives in Ireland, they are joined by SLP Jean (US) and the team of Super-mums Niamh (US), Elaine (IRE) and Mary (IRE). Between them, they have a wealth of experience with kids and apps. As parents of Special Needs Children, they know how difficult it can be to find the right app for your child. They hope to make this a little easier by providing reviews and also showcasing the Developers who make the apps.

 

LittleeLit.com is a collaborative think tank of professionals thinking about the topic of young children, new media, and libraries. Begun by Cen Campbell in 2011, this blog is a wealth of resources for children's librarians.

Individuals who share their viewpoints, experiences, and presentations in Little eLit blog posts are expressing their personal views and do not represent Little eLit as a whole.

The Caped Learner is an app review blog featuring great educational apps for young children. It is dedicated to helping parents make good app choices in an era where we struggle to make informed technology decisions. The Caped Learner is written by Rahat Mahmood, mother of three young children and a technology professional. Rahat lives in Toronto and uses her children as an excuse to indulge herself in her secret passion for children’s fiction, apps and baking. Her blog is named after a certain four-year-old who believes all things are best experienced with a cape on.

Website owners - let us know if you would like to join our network!

Note: We will not repost more than 10% of any other site's review content and have an exchange program in place for each of the above sites to repost our content in the same, limited way. Please contact us for more information ... 

http://digital-storytime.com/guest-reviewer.php

We offer consultation with our Editor, Carisa Kluver, directly for new book app projects.

This does not include expediting a review, advertising or other promotions on our network of sites. This service is intended to be a resource for app developers to get feedback privately about their project and brand, as well as to help developers plan for future trends in the market. (all prices are in US dollars, invoiced via paypal)

All services are customized, confidential and entirely separate from any (current/future) reviews of the app(s). Our goal is to help creative teams get their questions answered so they can make informed decisions about their children's digital content. We provide a sounding board, information about current trends and marketing strategies, based on the fast changing app and ebook industry.

Consultation packages*:

Basic Plan - $199

Includes a brief written report, based on the content creator or developer's questions, ideas and plans. Up to 2 hours of research for up to 10-12 questions about any part of the app project. This package also includes folow-up emails, as needed, for any additional questions or clarification. This plan does not include any personal phone or video consultation.

Premium Plan - $299

Includes everything in the "Basic Plan". In addition, we provide video or phone consultaion for additional follow-up questions and clarification about the market or development plan. With this plan, we also provide a written report at the end, to summarize the consultation.

Beta Testing - $199 to $399

Includes 2-6 hours of testing your kids app & a written report detailing areas of strengths and any needs for improvement. Up to two detailed email or phone conversations are included for any follow up questions, including marketing suggestions.

*Consultation can also be purchased by the hour, on a case-by-case basis, depending on availablity (via phone, video chat or email) for an additional $95/hour.

All consultation is separate from our review and advertising services. If we review an app that has used any of our beta testing or consultation services, we will disclose this at the end of the review.

Our Story:

Digital-Storytime.com was founded in December 2010 by a husband and wife development team. Marc Kluver was a computer engineer who decided to teach himself Android & iOS app programming as well as web design after a career in various programming jobs. Carisa Kluver had been a school counselor, health educator and researcher in child & maternal health prior to starting this project. In addition to this site, they have developed several apps, including "Dash & Ditto's Playground" for iPhone. For more information about their other projects see: catglo.com

As parents themselves, Carisa & Marc wanted to create a site that would help other parents and educators find out more about picture book apps for iPad. Detailed ratings and information are included for every app reviewed. Since they have a bookish young child, the couple shares almost all of the books reviewed with their son, who is currently in 2nd grade.

In addition to this site, Carisa also maintains a blog called “The Digital Media Diet” that covers topics about digital media, kids & technology. It includes over a dozen unique top 10 lists of recommended iPad books as well as articles about app development, marketing apps and other topics related to the digital publishing industry. See the blog for a list of resources for parents, recommended app review sites and industry resources on the right side-bar.

Popular posts include, "How will iPad picture books affect young reader’s literacy?", "The Changing Face of Children’s Books – New Challenges, New Opportunities", "An Adventure Worth Having: Self-Publishing Your Children’s Book as an App" and "iPad Best of the Best – 25 Essential Children’s Book Apps".

About the reviews:

Each review is written by Carisa herself and takes a great deal of time. As a result, the site cannot review all submissions, meaning the site does trend toward apps with reviews over 3.5+ stars overall. Only book apps available as iOS Universal or iPad apps are currently considered for review. Most of the apps reviewed, although not all, fall into the iTunes category of “Books” in the AppStore. Apps based on print titles and those with a text story will also be considered when published under other categories. 

To request a review on this site, fill out this form.

For a detailed description of our star ratings, please see: 

A Star-Studded Rating System – Behind the Scenes at Digital-Storytime.com

This site brought to you by: 

This site was developed by Catglo in co-operation with Zendiv. Catglo sepcializes in software development for mobile and web platforms. Catglo is responsible for the backend functionality of the site. Zendiv specialiszes in graphic design for both web sites and mobile apps. Zendiv is responsible for the look and feel of our software. If you are intrested in getting a high quality app or website designed and written by our team fill out our contact form and we will get back to you.

To contact us click here.

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Information on our sites' traffic, CTR, etc. are available upon request. All advertising must be pre-paid via paypal. We have a limited number of large ads so please plan ahead.

To get more information or sign up for a direct ad account: 

http://digital-storytime.com/contact.php

All ads must be pre-approved (in most cases, approval will happen within 24 hours of uploading a new ad).

We accept ads for family-friendly products, including kid & family-friendly apps.

However, we do not accept ads for book apps pending review. Once an app has been approved for review on our site, meaning it will qualify for at least a 3.5 overall rating, it can be included in our ads even if the review has not yet been published.

If you would like a book app reviewed on this site, buying ad space is not a way to get a good or speedy review. We recommend waiting until after your book app has been reviewed to place an ad for that app. All advertising is separate from our review process and has NO influence on the content of our reviews.

Ad policy as of: February 17, 2013

Disclosure Policy

The United States Federal Trade Commission requires that we disclose any relationship that we have with the App Developers we review.  We have developed a policy at Digital-Storytime.com that we hope is easy to understand.

Our Policy:

1. We are never paid to give a positive review of any product. Like most review sites, we do accept complimentary copies of the book apps we review. We also have a priority service for developers who want to time the publication of their reviews, for a fee. These reviews are expedited but still adhere to the same standards for objectivity. We will indicate at the end of priority reviews when a developer has paid to expedite it.
2. All our reviews are based on our experience and evaluation of the individual books themselves. As a result, the views and opinions expressed here are purely ours. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the company that developed it.
3. Our site was designed and created by a husband-wife team that also collaborates on app development. Should we ever promote one of our own products, we promise to disclose that fact in the review or description. Currently, we do not produce any iPad book apps and therefore do not review our own apps.
4. We promote family-friendly developers, in part because we believe that families care about who they are buying products from, especially for their children. Because it matters to us, as parents, we take into consideration what we can find out about the companies, developers, authors and illustrators of the books we review.  
   
5. We are members of Moms With Apps, a group of individual, independent, family-friendly developers who share best practices on making and marketing mobile apps. This does not affect the content of our reviews, but it may get an otherwise obscure title by a small developer reviewed sooner.
6. Due to the large number of requests we get for reviews, we often screen out many book apps that would not get at least a 3.5 on our overall scale, which is why so few books in our database score lower.
7. We sell advertising space, including ads to the companies that develop book apps. These ads do not influence the content of our reviews. 
8. We also have advertising on our site through ad services. For these ads, we have no direct relationship with our advertisers, nor do we endorse their products beyond approving their ads as appropriate content to be seen on our family-friendly site.
9. Any promotions we give away to readers from app developers are offered as a service to our readers and in no way influence the content of our reviews. Our 'daily deals' are promotions by developers available to the general public. Prices in iTunes change frequently and cannot be guaranteed in anyway.
10. Purchases made through iTunes links on our site include our 'linkshare' affiliate account information, giving our site a tiny commission on each paid transaction. This does not change the price in any way for consumers.

If you want more information contact us using our contact form.

This policy was established September 24, 2012.

To submit an app for review: http://digital-storytime.com/reviewRequest.php#1

There is no fee for our regular review service but timing of publication can be up to a year after submission. We do have two paid options for expedited reviews. Because we want to cover a wide variety of titles for our readers, paid services are limited to no more than 20% of our total content, meaning this service is not always available. Paid priority services do not impact the content of the review OR ensure a good review.

Repost: $50 [Written review reprinted from Partner Site Network* with 9-Category Rating by Digital-Storytime] Example

Basic Review: $100  [Brief written review.] Example

Premium: $150 [Detailed full review with all the trimmings.] Example

All priority services are published within 10 business days.

*Partner site reviews must already be published for consideration

While we wish we could review all the book app requests we receive, we are a small family-run website and are unable to review all submissions. We appreciate your understanding and patience.

If you have any questions about this process please let us know at feedback@digital-storytime.com or use our comment form: http://digital-storytime.com/contact.php. We also run the blog, The Digital Media Diet. Check out our guest posts by developers about 'lessons learned' for strategies to market apps & more.

Thank you again for your time and interest in Digital-Storytime.com!