As The Age of Apps continues to shift the landscape over numerous different areas of human endeavour and interest, there seems to be no field that gets left behind. With their new app ‘Make it for Teachers and Schools’, Planet Factory Interactive seeks to expand the field of education. As we move increasingly towards a fully digitised world, this is one area that mustn’t be left behind. Luckily for us, the folks at PFI are looking to makesure everyone stays up to speed.
What’s clear from the get go is that this is not some rushed attempt at a quick-buck educational software. The developers have put real thought and creativity into it, and the result is an app that stands apart from the crowd in a jammed congregation of similar efforts. ‘Make it’ turns on the ability to customise lessons and content. Not everyone learns at the same pace, and here teachers and students alike are given a real opportunity to address this.
There’s a choice of eight different interactive activities which you can further adapt to suit your needs, including games, quizzes and books. You can download a large selection of libraries and then work from there with your chosen subject. For example, if you wanted to learn more about flags (which I did as I am beyond useless with flags and it sort of constitutes a geography lesson at the same time, albeit a primary school one), you download the library giving you access to the content, select the activity you want to create, then customise it as you see fit. I chose a match-the-object game, where a bright, simplistic interface ensured I got the most out of my selected lesson. You can add video, text, images and sounds to your lesson to personalise it further. In my case it was just a simple task of making it aesthetically pleasing, but the real value here to teachers and students shouldn’t be overlooked.
Sharing your lesson is simply a matter of sending via email, social media, or uploading to the cloud. Content can be viewed on any device and in any language, which is another handy and well thought out feature. With further evidence of PFI having their finger on the pulse, the app also includes an interesting ‘storyteller’ feature, geared towards developing kids’ narrative skills. All in all, this is a smart, original app. Creating your own lessons is genuinely fun and should appeal to teachers, students and families alike. A cool, contemporary way to engage with a tech-savvy generation, Planet Factory should be applauded here for their efforts in furthering app based education.
