Kids A-Z

I’ve been using Headsprout and RazKids for almost ten years in my classroom. In the past year it has gotten very buggy. It freezes while loading, crashes, or in Headsprout it started returning students to the screen where they need to select Headsprout or the book room after every single activity. It’s great when it works but lately it doesn’t, not on the app or browser (safari or chrome) on iOS, not on PCs in Chrome. Updates haven’t fixed anything and it seems to be getting worse. Students understandably get so upset when it freezes and they lose their progress and it wastes my time to try and troubleshoot and find workarounds. FIX THE SOFTWARE. We use other apps and software without issue and school subscriptions are reevaluated yearly. There’s no need to spend money if it doesn’t work. UPDATE: Instead of fixing Headsprout or incorporating it into their counterintuitive and obsolete the day it was released Foundations A-Z program, they shut it down. Headsprout was the best thing they ever put out and the reason is that they bought it from another company. I’m done with it. Reading Eggs is a pretty good replacement, but I will miss using Headsprout since it was a good supplementary program with a different and complimentary teaching order that really taught students to read.

The latest update to the user interface removed the rocket ship tracking my kids reading progress. Instead replaced it with a circle and number of activities left. This change is not a good one. My kids loved seeing the visualization of their hard work and got very excited when they “leveled up” which is no longer get there. Also, why does it only count books accessed through the “level up!” button and not through the “reading room” button? My daughter read lots of books through the reading room but didn’t get credit for them when she went into level up!

This app was the system my son and I used to improve his English reading by 40% in 1 school quarter. This app is better than the others because it has reading levels that tailor to child’s reading level, it has an audio book option, key word definitions at the end of book, questions at the end of each book to check on comprehension, and a reward system that motivated my son to read. I remain involved in my son’s learning by having him read to me to ensure he was putting forth a proper effort, but it is great having questions with multiple answers at the end of the books instead of me trying to think of good questions. I was told by his 2nd grade teacher that because he is ESL his English reading was behind by half a grade. My son has used this app via DODDEA schools daily and twice on weekends to get caught up. I only wish DODDEA would have kept the contract with RAZ Kids so we can continue to use it.