Pocket Tales Blog: Archive

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Should Children Be Forced to Read the Classics?

I love Anne of Green Gables. The book is a classic and always brings a smile to my face listening to Anne ramble and tears to my eyes when the end draws near. My wife and I were watching the movie version and, afterwards, my wife turned to me and said that I should read the book to the class. Which made me think, Is this a book that I would read to my class in today’s day and age? Would...

Feb 2nd

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Reading for Life: Video Resources for Parents on...

As the Pockettales team continues building out cool new features and improvements in our website (btw, more new cool features are on the way!), we occasionally, come across some interesting resources for parents and educators. Reading is probably one of the toughest areas to teach and definitely something that parents struggle with at home in knowing how to support their children. While parents...

Jan 26th

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Enhanced Books for the Ipad Kid

More and more, kids are using digital platforms like the ipad for reading. With recent studies showing that kids prefer digital e-books with enhanced content over regular paper editions and comprehension levels remaining similar for both digital and print copies, enhanced books are going to become increasingly popular. While some critics state that, the level of recall actually was less when...

Jan 22nd

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New Student Profile Page = More New Features...

As we continue to build out new features for Pockettales, we want to share with you some of the great changes and additions we have in development. A few posts ago, we shared a new feature we are working on that we’re really excited about. We know that the teacher dashboard is going to be a great addition for teachers in helping them make better decisions for their reading programs. Today...

Jan 20th

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Choosing "Just Right" Books

One of the more difficult things in supporting and encouraging your child’s reading, is knowing the right kinds of books to purchase or borrow that fit with your child’s current reading level. There are many things that can make it difficult or that you need to think about when choosing appropriate books for your child. These can include: Finding a book that matches or engages your...

Jan 13th

Coming Feature Announcement: Teacher Dashboards

As hinted at, Pockettales has been thinking up some great additions to the Pockettales site to include more functionality and tools for teachers. As you can see below, we are putting the finishing touches on a new teacher’s dashboard. While our vision is to make Pockettales a great way for students to share and be introduced to great books, we also feel that there is a great opportunity...

Jan 3rd

Happy New Years From Pockettales

Everyone here at Pockettales would like to wish you and your loved ones a Happy and Safe New Years! We’re looking forward to big things in the New Year so keep coming back and tell your friends about us! Above all, keep reading and sharing great books! We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. - B. F. Skinner

Dec 31st

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Weekend Fun: Cooking with Children's Literature

So, I was organizing my kitchen cupboard to make room for the three new Jamie Oliver books I received for Christmas (and boy, does he have a lot of cookbooks), when I came across this delightful book by Liz Franklin called Cooking Italian with Kids. While it’s a little old for my children, it got me wondering if there was a way to combine favorite children’s literature books with...

Dec 30th

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From Classic Books to Screen (Or the new Hobbit...

Quick question … What’s even better than reading a classic book for the hundredth time; a book that you could probably recite from memory? Seeing your favorite book come to life on the big screen. Now, I know what you are saying. So many times, you look forward to the movie adaptation only to be so disappointed that you come out of the theater weeping like the Mock Turtle in Alice...

Dec 29th

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More Reasons To Read Aloud to Your Children

As if you didn’t need more reasons to read to your children, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which assesses 15 year olds from the world’s leading industrialized nations, released their findings of a sub-group looking at the affects of adult participation in their children’s education. The findings stated that, Fifteen-year-old students whose parents...

Nov 28th

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Wintry Books to Celebrate the Season!

I don’t know about you but it’s getting cold here. While it’s not the coldest I have ever experienced (you don’t know cold until you are walking in -30 degree weather with a windchill that makes it -42 degrees to the school which is still open even when buses don’t run!), it is still cold enough to put on the Bing Crosby Christmas album, get some good books and...

Nov 21st

Pockettales Founder Featured in News Media

Cruising from one success to the next, Pockettales Founder Yaw Awing was featured in the Nov. 5 edition of the Post-Bulletin Newspaper. Developing the idea from his experiences as a young child, playing math games on the computer, Yaw talks about the early days in creating the popular online reading site. You can read the short excerpt here or if you have access to the print edition, you can read...

Nov 5th

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10 Reasons Why You Should Read Aloud To Your Child

After having written the blog post on how to choose a good read-aloud, I thought afterwards that I should have perhaps started with the why of reading aloud. In our busy days and schedules, it can be easy to dismiss prioritizing time to read aloud to our children. In his book, “The Read-Aloud Handbook”, Jim Trelease gives several important reasons to read-aloud. Surprisingly, I just...

Nov 5th

Read-Alouds for Children: Choosing A Good Book

Reading out loud to your children, whether you are a teacher or a parent, is one of the best ways to encourage and share the love of reading to your children. However, some books are better than others for this as I discovered last year when I went to share a great book I had found with my class. I had just finished reading The Mysterious Benedict Society and was so excited to share it with the...

Oct 30th

21st Century Ken and Changing Paradigms!

That would be Sir Ken Robinson of course (Not Ken of Barbie and Ken fame. Not that that Ken doesn’t deserve a lifetime service award for his work over the years but I digress)! Sir Ken, a proponent on changes to our education system, recently spoke at a conference on changing the traditional paradigm of education. It’s a great video by RSA Animate. They have taken his speech and...

Oct 22nd

Getting Children to Read More!

Interesting article on CNN.com on getting children to read more. Teaching children to read is such a fine balance in schools. Getting children to love reading but also to impart upon them the skills they need to become better readers can be tricky particularly amongst boys. While we want to encourage children to read, by putting into place a variety of reading programs like Accelerated Reader; a...

Oct 14th

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Pockettales Wins Global Education Challenge!

We knew that Pockettales was awesome! Teachers love it, kids love it and now big name publishers have told us that they think our idea could have an amazing impact on student learning! The Global Education Challenge is a new award sponsored by Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt Publishers to identify innovative, game-changing ideas for improving K-12 student outcomes around the world. Amongst the many...

Oct 12th

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Reading For...

Welcome and hello, eh? My name is Ian Hancock and I am so happy to be the newest member of the Pockettales team! As we are going to be seeing a lot of each other over the coming days, weeks and years, I thought I would take a moment to tell everyone a little about myself. For the last twelve years, I have worked in the Education field primarily as an elementary teacher. I have taught all ages...

Oct 9th

Great Things Ahead!

It’s been a busy start to the year for Pockettales and there has been so much happening since we last wrote on our blog that we felt that we needed to let all the Pockettalers in on some of the exciting things going on behind the scenes. First of all, we want to introduce our newest member to the team, Ian Hancock. While we will let him introduce himself, we are so excited to have him as a part of...

Oct 8th

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Screenshots

Bookshelf Download (811KB) Library Download (598KB) Amulets Download (135KB) Recommendations Download (274KB)

Aug 9th

How Pocket Tales Designs Badges

At Pocket Tales, we love searching for and discovering the best literature for kids and young adults. We also like to take some innovative approaches to introducing the literature we find to kids. One approach we use is in how we design our badges (which we call amulets) that kids can win on Pocket Tales. Here are some things we evaluate when designing a new amulet. 1) Give the Amulet a...

Jul 18th

Read Children's Books - Get Cash!

Pocket Tales is looking for teachers, parents or anyone passionate about children’s literature to help us with an exciting new project. We recently launched the first version of Pocket Tales, and to keep up with our users’ insatiable demand to test their knowledge on the books they’ve read, we’re looking for people to join our quiz creation team! Here’s what...

Jul 1st

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Frontend Web Developer/Tech Co-founder (full-time)

Pocket Tales is an online social reading game that turns reading books into a game for 9 -13 year old kids. In other words, Pocket Tales is to reading books what fantasy football is to watching football games and Foursquare is to going places. We are funded by NYC-based Startl and Philadelphia-based Dreamit Ventures. We currently have a workable product and are in a closed-alpha stage. Role...

Jun 30th

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Ruby on Rails Developer/Tech Co-Founder...

Pocket Tales is an online social reading game that turns reading books into a game for 9-13 year old kids. In other words, Pocket Tales is to reading books what fantasy football is to watching football games and Foursquare is to going places. We are funded by NYC-based Startl and Philadelphia-based Dreamit Ventures. We currently have a workable product and are in a private-alpha stage. Role...

Jun 30th

May 12th

Apr 28th

2,145 notes

Watch

Video of our 2 minute pitch at the 2010 SXSW Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator Competition. We apologize for the quality but the Accelerator did not make the video available (isn’t it weird that an Interactive Tech Conference doesn’t make video footage they have available?) and we are lucky that our friend Isaac Heyveld had the presence of mind to capture video of the live stream. Thanks...

Mar 24th

Top 3 Most Innovative Entertainment Technology at...

This past weekend, Pocket Tales took a trip to Texas for the South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive festival. It was a great experience for us to pitch our concept to the scrutiny of some of the most innovative and influential minds in technology today. Our first 2 minute pitch went over really well. The judges for our group had built a notorious reputation for ruthlessly tearing apart the...

Mar 19th

Watch

Actual Slides from our pitch at the 2010 SXSW Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator Competition

Mar 18th

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Pocket Tales is presenting at SXSW!

Pocket Tales was recently offered an exclusive invitation to compete in SXSW’s Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator Competition. I assume your reaction at this point is either ”So what?” or ”No way?!” The “So what’s” keep reading… The “No way’s”, here’s our proof: Link: http://sxsw.com/interactive/accelerator/finalists ...

Feb 20th

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Press Contact

R. Brennan Knotts Founder and CEO brennan@pockettales.com Office: 317.426.6494 Mobile: 513.225.2338

Feb 19th

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About Pocket Tales

Pocket Tales turns reading books into a game for kids and their friends. It’s a remarkable way for kids to engage with books, discover their next read, and share recommendations. Based in Indianapolis, Pocket Tales was founded by Brennan Knotts and Yaw Aning. Brennan is formerly the Director of Marketing of internet video tech startup, Cantaloupe.tv. Yaw was previously an analyst for midwest...

Feb 19th

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Logos

Small Logo (24KB) Big Logo (117KB)

Feb 19th

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Founder Photos

R. Brennan Knotts Photo (246KB) Yaw Aning Photo (172KB)

Feb 19th

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In the News (the stuff other people write)

Talking About Books, Flicks, Dixie Chicks — and Beer August, 2010 Publishing Trends The Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator Finalists March 16, 2010 Elance Blog Three Companies to Watch At SXSW 2010 March 12, 2010 Elance Blog Pocket Tales Makes Reading Social and Fun March 10, 2010 Tech Cocktail Indiana Developers to Pitch Game at Microsoft Competition March 9, 2010 Inside Indiana...

Feb 19th

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Press Releases (the stuff we write)

Pocket Tales Announces Invitation to SXSW Accelerator March 9, 2010 Download Press Release

Feb 19th

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Contact Info

General Inquiries: Pocket Tales (Summer 2010 Address) c/o Dreamit Ventures 3711 Market St. Suite 800 Philadelphia, PA 19104 Phone: 317.426.6494 Inquiries: info@pockettales.com Twitter: @PocketTales Press Inquiries: R. Brennan Knotts Founder and CEO Brennan@pockettales.com Office: 317.426.6494 Mobile: 513.225.2338

Feb 19th