POETRY drives home some key skills about reading literature that shouldn’t be underestimated. By organizing poems by theme, the app truly emphasizes content over author: Poems of lesser-known poets stand side-by-side with works that have been beloved for centuries, allowing users to focus more closely on the content and quality of the writing. Under the guidance of a good teacher, learners could discover insights about the importance in poetry of tone, diction, and other literary devices.
Unfortunately, the app’s features are limited: There’s no ability for annotating texts, and opportunities for sharing are limited to a few options for sharing posts to social media. It would also be educationally useful if users could import or access poems not built into the app. POETRY provides a terrific range of authors including Dante, Shakespeare, Dryden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar — but with only a few poems included from giants like T.S. Eliot and Walt Whitman, what’s missing is glaring. POETRY would be good for learning in the context of a well-articulated, well-structured poetry unit in the classroom, but it wouldn’t be nearly as instructive or engaging without that guidance.
Website: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id370143863?uo=4&at=10laCG&ct=website
Overall User Consensus About the App
Student Engagement
The SPIN function is really engaging, allowing kids to discover and explore new authors and unexpected works by theme and mood.
Curriculum and Instruction
It’s hard to use POETRY in an especially directed way, and it’s not possible to annotate or interact with the poems beyond saving them to a Favorites list.
Customer Support
Some nice capabilities for scaling text and enlarging the poems on-screen are provided, although text-to-speech features won’t work in the app. Some poems do include an audio option.
