Spelling Monster » Blog

What We Have Been Up To Lately.

Tracie Davis — Tue, 06 May 2014 17:01:37 +0000

We have been working on a lot lately. Since my last update we have fixed a couple bugs, I went to my first Google conference, released a new game, and are about to release another update with a new feature and a new game. Yes, we have been busy. I love getting e-mails with comments like we love your app or my child has done better in spelling since using your app (those are my favorite). I also like getting e-mails about how to make Spelling Monster better. I am always surprised that people are surprised that I e-mail back and am a real person. Ok back to what we have been doing.

The bug fixes consisted of two things. One was a simple programming error that resulted in a huge problem. This affected sharing mainly but in extreme cases it would’t allow to select a list at all, rendering Spelling Monster useless. I do believe we lost a few people with this one. We tried our best testing on every device we had, and borrowing friend’s device’s. We would get glimpses of hope with people who really worked with us and we finally nailed it out and got it taken care of. Thank you to all of you. The second bug, we had no control over. Chevol our developer could explain it much better then me but pretty much it boiled down to tablet updates not being compatible with program used to code SM. So when they did their update we did our update fixing the black screen problem on certain Android devices. Thank you for everyones patience and support. We really appreciate it.

My first Google conference was the Google Play Playtime, which was a conference about Google Play for education. I learned a lot, but like I said this was my first one. I was a little star struck as I got to meet Chore Monster’s Chris Bergman. The panel’s were nice, a little one sided IMO but still very helpful. Hearing from the educator’s and the kids I think was the most helpful. That being said hearing what the parent’s thought was nice too. We didn’t get to stay for the happy hour part of the conference. Chev’s main job was hang issue’s and we had to get back to NC from NYC so we left as soon as the conference was over. I also got to meet a lot of other educational app creator’s. All in all it was a good time.

When we did the bug fix update I believe, we also introduced a new monster and game. So let me formally introduce to you Hank and our “Word Harvest” game. I think this is currently my favorite game. You pull up carrots with your letters on them to spell your words. It’s a fun game you should try it if you haven’t.

Now for the update about to release or will be released depending on when I finish this post and Apple finishes reviewing. By popular request apostrophe’s are now possible so you can include word contractions. This took some thought and planning to get just right. We wanted to make sure it tested well in all situation’s. So I am very pleased to say we are now including this. I love including other’s idea’s on how to make this app better. Also we will be releasing a new game and monster. I have to give Beatz favorite classroom a shout out. Thank you to Mrs Brackx 3rd grade class. They named this game’s monster for us. So without further ado meet Spike in our “Letter Angling” game. This is a fishing game. You fish for your letter’s to spell your words correctly.

In closing I would like to remind our supporters of a couple things. If you love Spelling Monster give us feedback either thru e-mail or via app store you purchased Spelling Monster. Also please be kind as it does take a little bit to resolve some issue’s. I do my best to answer e-mails with a couple hours I get them. That being said we all work full time day jobs and have families. We created Spelling Monster with our children in mind and work diligently resolving issue’s when we have them. We truly love hearing from people, the good, bad, and even the ugly. Thank for all your support.

Voice Feature Tutorial.

Tracie Davis — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 08:00:15 +0000

We had lots of requests to add a voice feature so kids could hear their words as well as see them. So we started working on this popular request. As we were working on this feature we realized that our users weren’t actually requesting the same things. Some of you wanted both sound and text, some wanted it to be left how it was, and some wanted just sound and no text. Our solution to this was to create a toggle in the “Settings” section.

1. Access voice feature options under settings. You have a few different options you may choose. If you select both “Use Audible Words” and “Show Words”, you will have both voice and text in the game HUD. If you select just “Use Audible Words” you will only have the option of sound in the game HUD. If you would like to just show the text in the game HUD just select “Show Words”.

2. Ok now that you have selected the options you would like, back out back to the home screen. Select “Words” and go to “Create/Edit”

3. From here you name your list as usual. I will name my list Fruit and save my list name.

4. Ok from here you can start adding your words. I add the word “Apple”. To attach sound to the word simply hit the blue record icon and speak the word into your devices microphone.

5. Once you have spoken the word hit the “Stop” icon. If you would like to confirm what was recorded simply tap the green “Play” icon.

If you don’t like your initial recording you may rerecord your word.

6.Once you are happy with the recording of your word tap the yellow “Add” icon.

7. Once you have saved your word and it is added to your word list it will have a “Sound” icon.

Holiday Updates.

Tracie Davis — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 14:13:27 +0000

First I would like to say thank you to all our supporters. Hope everyone that celebrates Thanksgiving had a good one, for everyone who doesn’t I hope you enjoyed your day. We have reached almost 25,000 downloads, and wouldn’t have without you. We had a great turn out for our Thanksgiving and Black Friday sale. It is so awesome to wake up, check analytics and see numbers in the thousands for the day. We were going to offer Spelling Monster free for Christmas and the day after but we received an e-mail from Apple stating that would be shut down more or less those days so no go. Don’t worry we are discussing other dates. I have to admit though I am really disappointed about this. We are undecided as whether to run it free on amazon for those days still.

Ok, on to what we are working on. We are trying to have an update before Christmas. Depending on your persecutive it will be big or small. For us and a lot of requesters it will be big. This update will have the voice feature added, so you will be able to hear the word as well as see it. We are hoping to also include a practice test, and 2 games, but times a ticking and we are still working on the voice feature. It’s usually easy for us buckle down when we get off work and work on Spelling Monster in the winter, it’s cold and gets dark so early. Except the holiday’s, where it’s really difficult. So much is going on with family and our children. So progress has slowed, but don’t worry if the practice test and 2 games don’t make it in this update they will be on the next update in January/February. We have had a decent amount of our user’s to upgrade to 2.0 but not everybody. You guys don’t know what you’re missing it’s a great update, with lots of UI upgrades. Ok well this is kinda of a short update. I think I am going to try shorter updates more often and see it goes. Hope everyone has a great holiday.

2.0 Update

Tracie Davis — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 12:00:18 +0000

So excited for the 2.0 update thats about to release for Spelling Monster. We are awaiting Apples approval. When it came down to it we had to shorten our wish list for this update, so we could get an update out there. That being said we are still very proud of this update. So what has changed or been added?
We updated the user interface throughout Spelling Monster, starting with our icon. It’s a little funner I think. Once you are in the app there are lots of great changes. We changed the home screen some but kept the simplicity. From the home screen you have three choices, add words, play games, or the new and improved parent gate.

Though the home screen has a new look and feel it still functions the same. Just as before you will go to words name your list and enter your words, but you will notice a change here as well. You will notice a “Share Lists” and “Get Lists” button. This is for teachers and parents with multiple students. Teacher’s or parent’s can create a spelling list and share it with there students or multiple children. This feature does require an internet connection. No data is taken or recorded this is completely secure with its only purpose to share spelling lists. A simple rundown of how it works. After you list is created tap the “Share Lists” button. Have your students or children on their individual devices press “Get Lists“ and voila teachers have shared their spelling lists with their students.

Now under our “Play” button. You will notice the map of Spelltopia has changed. Same fun games with a new feel. Follow the trail around and you will notice a new game, Lighthouse Letters and monster named Trapper. We have new pause and end screens.
Now on to our “Parent Gate”. To access parent area simply press the gear down for three seconds. Behind the parent gate parents will be able to access their children’s stats. No changes in statistics. You will also be able to access “Settings” here. Settings is where you are able to choose game difficulty, and upper and lowercase. Also under the parent gate section you will find the”About Us”, “Feedback”, and “Rate The App”. Nothing has changed in these areas other than putting them behind the parent gate.

We also have a few bug fixes in this update. For our Android devices we fixed the back button misunderstanding. So now hitting your on device back button won’t exit you out of the app. An on all platforms we are fairly certain we fixed the issue that only some devices seemed to experience with not being able to select a list after a certain number of lists were entered. Honestly this bug has been a huge challenge. There was no rhyme or reason this was happening and it wasn’t happening on every device but its randomness was happening across multiple platforms. We had one IOS user, two Kindle users, and one Android user contact us, I can only imagine how many didn’t. Please contact us we can’t try and fix what we aren’t told about.
We already have things in place to begin working on our next update. Some buzz on the next update? A voice feature with practice test by popular request. Thank you to all of our users that give us constructive criticism. Also a new monster and game will be added to Spelltopia’s map.

We hope your kids enjoy this update as much as our kids.

Updates We Are Working On.

Tracie Davis — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 11:00:34 +0000

We have a lot going on in the past couple weeks, besides me better learning how to market Spelling Monster. Hmm… Where to begin?

By teacher request we have been working on two new features. First adding a voice feature, and second adding a syncing feature. At first with the voice feature we were unsure how to incorporate it, for now what I believe we have decided is to add voice to the practice test I have spoke of in previous posts. When you add your words in the beginning you will add the sound using the microphone feature on the keyboard. The practice test will say the word to you, the text area above will be blank unlike in the games. When you type the word it will appear in the above text box. With this we are hoping to simulate when the teacher calls out your words during testing. For our syncing feature we have had a few teachers request being able to add the classroom spelling words to a master device and have their students be able to access the list in the classroom. Syncing was our solution. A teacher can share their lists on a secure server and their students can connect to that server and get their spelling lists.

In some other exciting news we have also partnered up with a designer. As a result we have been completely overhauling Spelling Monster graphically. I could not have imagined the impact a designer would have. It has been like Christmas. To see what he created off what we had is just amazing. It’s crazy really, we had worked hard with our limited experience with graphics and I think we did pretty good under the circumstance, but then a designer touches it with their blessed hands and this magic happens that turns to mediocre to awesome. In our next update we will have all new graphics and new user interface. We are so excited about these changes. Please keep checking back for updates.

Trial and Error

Tracie Davis — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 11:00:31 +0000

This weeks blog post is mostly about editing and/or deleting a word or word list. First off let me start by saying yes you can delete a word or a word list by simply swiping left to right on the word or wordlist you want to edit or delete. You should then see a delete button appear on the right hand side of the row, tap that and you should get a confirmation that it has been deleted. We chose this approach because in my head I thought it to be an obvious universal since that is how you delete an e-mail on your phone. Boy was I wrong, I guess in hind sight of coarse it made sense in my head but that doesn’t mean by any stretch of the imagination was it as obvious as I thought. There are so many reasons now why I realize how naive I was in this approach. Not that it is not an acceptable way to handle the action but I needed to have added a tutorial letting my users know how to use all features of Spelling Monster. Not just assume that they would just know. This will be something that will be addressed in the not too distant future. I would say the only benefit to this was being able to interact with some our parents out there when they e-mailed to ask how to edit and/or delete. This being the case because not only would they ask how to edit or delete. More times than not they have made suggestions which we try our best to include in our app. One example being a choice between upper and lower case letters. For our parents that go to www.spellingmonster.com I have added this to our FAQ page until we come up with our solution.

Second part of this blog post is… So we got the ever dreaded 1 star rating from one well two of our parents. The issue for me is I wish there was a way I could contact them directly, not to argue why with them but to get more info so we can make our app better. The issues? The couple concerns I read was in our free version. We had a full ad at initial launch. We did research found an ad company that had COPPA compliant ads tested didn’t have any issues on our couple devices and no problems, but a parent noticed that one of the ads loaded was for a non age appropriate game and gave us 1 star, I understand being upset I would be as well. I just wish they contacted us and gave us a chance to rectify the situation. We have since removed the ads completely in our free version. So I hope this parent gives us another chance but I know this is unlikely. Our other issue that needs to be fixed. To one parent it appeared that the free version had no actual games and was just a plug for our paid version. They downloaded our app passed our ad at initial launch. Added there words to choose the first game the text balloon comes up saying that game is a premium game, ok so I have to assume now annoyed mildly that go to the next game and… another premium game. They don’t make it any further, by now their as I would be, annoyed, enough to say forget it and assume that all the games are like that… So as a result we are working on a new way to display our games so it is more obvious as to which games are, um active we will say.

At the end of the day we want Spelling Monster to be the best we can make it. The best way to do that is listen to our user base. So please feel free to contact us directly at info@spellingmonster.com with any questions, comments, suggestions, or concerns. We love to hear from you.

New games and Updates.

Tracie Davis — Sun, 08 Sep 2013 18:23:10 +0000

I really don’t have much to write about this week. Though that doesn’t mean we haven’t been hard at work. Well what have you been doing you may ask? We have been working on a few different things lately, two new games, having a uppercase and lowercase option, and a difficulty option by request of several users. We have had a few inquiries about our teachers version. So we have also worked that back into things after putting the teachers version on hold for a while. We have also been discussing adding some type of tutorial for first time users and after updates with new features.
When I’m not obsessing over black out bingo, one of the two games we are working on is a baseball type game. Simple game play just like the others making the main focus the letters and words. Pretty much a ball with a letter in it, swing if its the correct letter to spell your word get a home run if not you get a strike and loose a star. An just like the rest loose three stars and you will have to start again. The second game, we are still toying with a few ideas so I will keep you posted. A friend of mine that uses Spelling Monster for her son likes to use the list to call out his words to him as a mock practice test and requested making list view font smaller so more words would fit on a page. Instead of this we are also working on practice test per say. The list would randomize so the words would not always be in the same order and have a check box so you would be able to check the ones you done.
By multiple user request we added a choice between uppercase and lowercase letters. We also have had a few teachers request a difficulty setting for game play. You can access these features in settings.
For our teachers version we are still working with teachers to get everything just right. We had put things on hold waiting to see how things went with the Spelling Monster app itself.

Well this what we are working on these days. Check back with us periodically to see our progress and what we are going to next.

L-I-T-E-R-A-T-U-R-E

Tracie Davis — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 18:30:57 +0000

Ziggy here with some “Spelling Buzz”.

Have you guys ever heard of this super speller Madeline Mervine? I came across an article about her and I thought it was really cool. Madeline, nicknamed the “Bookworm” is a great speller beating out 20 other students to represent her school in the state spelling bee at the Oregon State Fair. L-I-T-E-R-A-T-U-R-E or literature is her favorite word to spell.

When asked ” How she became such an awesome speller? ” ”Reading” she replied.

She loves to read. The article says she has read everything from a children’s version of ”Moby Dick” to all 13 Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events.” She even reads the dictionary.

WOW!!!

I was so impressed I had tell all of Spelltopia about how great of a speller, and reader Madeline is.

Reading is a great way to learn to spell and have fun adventures.

If you would like to find out more about Madeline four yourself check out Spelling champ’s secret? Reading, and lots of it.

Word Study: A New Way to Teach Spelling

Tracie Davis — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 18:24:03 +0000

Hey Friends! This is Beatz, coming to you with this weeks edition of………. The Spelling Buzz!!!

Have you guys ever heard of the practice of “Word Study” as a way to teach spelling? I came across this article that was pretty cool, and I thought I would share it with you guys!

“Word study” is an alternative to traditional spelling instruction. It is based on learning word patterns rather than memorizing unconnected words.

Most teachers teach spelling by giving a student a list, then drill them with this list of word for a week, then move on to the next list of words. This way of teaching is seen to be boring and tedious for students. Word study provides students with opportunities to investigate and understand the patterns is words. Knowledge of these patterns means that students needn’t learn to spell one word at a time. For example, the difference between “hard c” (as in can) and a “soft c” (as in cell). After learning many words containing the letter “c”, students learn that “c” is usually hard when followed by consonants (as in climb and crumble) and the vowel “a”, “o”, and “u” (as in cat and cut). The “c” is usually soft when followed by “i”, “e”, and “y” ( as in circus and cycle).

Seems like a cool new way to learn spelling to me!!! Maybe I will teach this to my spelling monster friends in Spelltopia!! Come and play with us anytime!!!

For more full article on”Word Study”:

http://www.readingrockets.org/article/80/

Back to School Giveaway.

Tracie Davis — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 15:55:10 +0000

Learning how to market our app has been a challenge for me. I had no idea how difficult marketing would be. How many different avenues you could take. I thought I had a plan. Though as each day goes by and I learn more and more I now realize well how many “holes” my plan had. I have read several articles an try my best to implement what I have learned. “How To Market Your App“, “10 Free Ways To Market Your App“are just a couple examples of articles that have helped. I have read “Pitch Perfect”by Erica Sadun and Steve Sande. Great book on promoting your app especially where it counts with bloggers. I have also asked other educational app developers what has worked for them. It’s slow going for me, definitely a learning process. Some thing we get right and somethings we missed the mark. For example even though I was told and had read how important release dates were, we released on an off day a friday if I am not mistaken. Our back to school giveaway is my attempt at utilizing an event/holiday/time of year.

For the month of August Spelling Monster has been doing a back to school giveaway. All of August Spelling Monster will be 50% off making it only $.99. For the last week we have given away promo codes through our Facebook page, 2 a day for the last week. On the 21st of August “Spelling Monster” will be free for the day. I am really excited to see how many downloads we get that day. We are also participating in smart app for kids “Back to School Bonanza.”

I believe Spelling Monster is a great tool for any child to learn their spelling words. I would love for all elementary children to be able to use our app. Learning should and can be fun.

Spelling Monster – Committed to building strong minds one game at a time.