BoggleNoggin Joe Rock and Friends Reviews and News

Joe Rock and Friends Book 3 has awarded an Editor's Choice Award. This is our second award from CTR!

Great Interactive Software for Kids, American Library Association, January 2008 Semi-Finalist

April, 2007 - Joe Rock has been selected for the "Our Choice 2007" list. This list is compiled by the Canadian Children's Book Centre is described as "the essential selection tool used by teachers, librarians, parents, and booksellers across the country to choose the best new Canadian children's books, magazines, audio and video."

April, 2007 - Scholastic Parent and Child. “This cool CD/DVD set helps children make the connection between print and associated sounds.”

March 2007 CM Magazine, published by the University of Manitoba reviews Joe Rock and Friends Book 1 and 2. "Each story is presented and read in English, Spanish and French, making the disks an ideal resource for EAL and multi-lingual students. My own grade two daughter attends a French immersion school and Joe Rock could prove an invaluable tool for her to enhance her French."

January 2007 Awarded a Blue Ribbon pick in the February edition of Technology K-8, a US educational publication.

December 1, 2006. Joe Rock and Friends was reviewed in the December 2006 issue of Children's Technology Review and received and "Editor's Choice" award and a score of 92%! Read the full review below “The addition of the music and trilingual capability to the stories makes this program an enjoyable and rich early reading experience.”

Joe Rock and Friends Reading Adventures, Book 3

Spring 2008 Software

Ages: 3 - 9 yrs.

Producer: BoggleNoggin Media

Home Use Price: $24.99

Platform: Windows/MAC

Review:

This third release of the interactive storybook series Joe Rock and Friends contains three stories starring the animated Joe Rock-who is indeed a rock with eyes, mouth and a friendly personality. In the first story, Joe and his quirky pal, Stan the Stick (yup, a stick), are practicing their for their rock band when human friend Kate and her brother Mike take them to the park to watch a painter-and try painting themselves. The second story transports Joe to the arctic north where, as the top rock of an Inukshuk (a symbolic pile of rocks), he meets a boy-whose grandfather Joe saved long ago in another adventure. And in the third story, Joe's back for Kate's birthday party which doesn't turn out as planned. Created by a team of Canadian teachers, these are quite the traditional interactive storybooks featuring imaginative plots, interesting characters and crisp 3D graphics. The target audience is the "emerging reader" who has started reading and needs practice and help. That's reinforced by the options that enable readers to change the complexity of each story by choosing fewer words, more words or most words. Another option: Read the pages silently, have Joe read the story aloud, or have each word pronounced as the cursor moves over it.

Included is a fantastic language-learning feature-instant translations of the text into English, French or Spanish as the book is being read. So if you chose to read the book in English, say, and would like an as-you-go translation into Spanish, just click the translation button and the words on that page toggle into Spanish and are read in Spanish. Or translate just one word at a time. Each story also has its own original songs that play from music-video pages separate from the story when you click the music symbol. There's a helpful program tutorial (click "Help") that explains the option and an Index Page allowing readers to return to individual pages. And a DVD bonus disk containing the three stories to watch on TV is included.

Be aware that the Joe Rock storybooks are not animated, just pleasant looking and amusing graphics that don't move at all. And unlike some interactive storybooks, there aren't click-and-play features on every page-like when you click the little dog it does a dance. Those tend to be a mixed blessing anyway.

In fact, this Joe Rock and Friends storybook stacks up well with other good interactive storybooks on the market, such as Disney's Mulan and Winnie the Pooh titles and Broderbund's Arthur storybooks. Your children won't learn to read using this product, but they might become better readers if they do.

A former writer and consumer columnist at The Washington Post for 22 years, Don Oldenburg is a freelance writer, editorial consultant and coauthor of "The Washington DC-Baltimore Dog Lovers Companion" (Avalon Travel). The father of three sons, he lives with them and wife, Ann, a writer at USA Today, in McLean, VA.

Joe Rock and Friends, Book 2 is a classic interactive storybook program, with a couple of nice educational twists. In this program, the user not only gets to select from three different stories, but also chooses the language (English, Spanish, French), and the level of vocabulary with which the story is presented.

Each of the stories - Joe and the Big trouble, Joe and the Priates, and Joe's Bad Dream, features a different adventure for our hero, Joe Rock. Joe is actually a rock. Not a mountain, not a boulder - just your basic, everyday, paperweight-size rock. Each story is about 30 pages in length, and has a few lines of text in a window beneath a colorful illustration. The user can elect to read alone, or have the program read the lines aloud. When read aloud, the words are individually highlighted as they are read. And if the translate option has been selected, the user can click on an icon and toggle the text between the initial language, and one other.

Joe Rock and Friends does a good job at achieving the program's intended purposes - improving reading skills and vocabulary, in multiple languages and levels. It uses colorful, clear, non-animated illustrations to transmit key story elements without the excessive distraction that animation would introduce. And by the program's careful synchronization of highlighting words in the text with the spoken word, users are able to simultaneously visualize and hear word breaks -- especially helpful when learning a new language. The stories provide students practice reading, listening, and speaking. When the program reads the stories aloud, it does so in a very clear collection of voices, and at a reasonable pace.

Even though these are simple short stories, they utilize non-simple vocabulary and grammar. For example, the Spanish language version set at the simplest vocabulary level makes use of multiple verb tenses, including: present, past, future, and present subjunctive. For non-native Spanish speakers, this might be comparable to a second year high school level.

Joe Rock and Friends, Book 2 presents three fun, original stories, combined with excellent illustrations -- and each in three languages. Students, both young and old, looking for exposure to and practice with new languages, will find it attractive.

Joe Rock and Friends ran without any installation required, directly from the CD on our test machine. Nice! After inserting the CD, the program starts automatically, and asks the user to select a language - English, Spanish, or French. Users can then pick a story, or stop and change any of three different configuration options dealing with vocabulary, translation options, and screen resolution.

Program navigation is simple and intuitive. Click a green arrow to turn the page, a red arrow to go back a page; click on a speaker icon to have the page read aloud. Our reviewers reported no difficulties.

Joe Rock and Friends is a useful reading and language learning tool, as a supplement to the more standard fare of textbooks, worksheets, and audio tapes.

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Joe Rock and Friends Reading Adventures, Book 3

BoggleNoggin Media

Ages 3 to 9

See SuperKids' comparisons with other Interactive Book software titles, and the Buyers Guide for current market prices of the PC and Mac versions of the program.