Last Updated on October 18, 2023 by Editorial Team
What is it like to be in the shoes of someone with a learning disability? The day-to-day lessons can be no less than a nightmare because they are differently abled. If your child is one of those suffering from learning disabilities such as dyslexia or dyscalculia, the effects can be magnanimous.
As a parent, dealing with the learning differences of your child can be a stressful experience, and that is actually when an array of learning applications comes to the rescue. With the correct teaching approach and pitch-perfect strategies, even children with severe learning disabilities can get the desired outcome.
If you ask us, there is no harm in using these apps in the comfort of your home if you want to see your kids improve their cognitive skills. But before listing the apps, it is incredibly important to understand the essence of the applications and the working mechanisms of the same.
Benefits of apps in learning disabilities for kids
Learning disabilities can hamper the kid’s learning to a great extent, and that in itself can be a source of insecurity. These apps can foster the learning process from the comfort of their homes and make it faster, bringing back long-lost confidence. They will provide a great platform for interaction and stimulation to the kids to have the perfect learning ambiance.
Starting from an easy reading approach to problem-solving abilities, the kids can have a helping hand without any added assistance. The working mechanism of the apps is top-notch and caters to the needs of special education. Keeping this in mind, We’ve curated a list of 11 really helpful apps for your kids with learning disabilities.
11 helpful apps for learning disabilities
1. MentalUP Educational Games
These brain-energizing games are an easy and fun way to boost your child’s learning abilities. They help in improving attention and enhancing concentration, linguistic skills, and even arithmetic abilities. They encourage critical thinking and problem-solving. Thus, 20 minutes daily of these 120-plus mental exercises can make a huge difference in your child’s life by enhancing their 5 core cognitive skills.
Link: PlayStore
2. Lumosity: Brain Training App
Used by 100 million people worldwide, the Lumosity brain training program app contains 40 plus activities to challenge your memory, speed, logic, problem-solving, maths, language, and more. It has a free 10-minute Fit test to set your baseline scores and even helps you compare with kids of similar age.
Once the baseline scores are set, it provides personalized challenges based on your training habits and preferences. It then provides detailed insights about your game strengths and weaknesses as you progress through your training, as well as a clear analysis of your gameplay to help you understand your cognitive pattern. It sure is a fun, interactive, and at the same time scientific way to help in your kid’s brain rewiring.
Link: Appstore | Playstore | Web App
3. Dyslexia Toolbox
Dyslexia Toolbox is the Chrome extension you must have if you are looking for web browsing assistance being dyslexic. It simplifies reading like none other, and it has specific features like the use of specific fonts for dyslexia like the Dyslexic font as well as left alignment.
It is like a complete toolbox to ease the reading for Dyslexic individuals, and some brilliant minds have put their heads together to use the dyslexic font to enhance concentration for differently-abled kids. The user interface is appreciable, and the parents need not be tech-savvy to have a grasp on this application.
Link: Chrome Extension
4. Sintelly Game App
Along with cognitive abilities, it is also important to encourage social-emotional learning by imbibing social-emotional skills in the kid, isn’t it? Otherwise, when they grow up, there can be many problems in making the child interact and create bonding with other individuals of a similar age group. This gaming application is apt for kids between the age of 6-12, (the perfect age for making friends) and it comprises various fantasy situations to improve emotional intelligence.
The game has derived its name from the famous poem of Rudyard Kipling “If” and it accentuates emotional learning. As the kids start playing, they learn what is kind and unkind, and they can have a hold over the dialogue choices of all the characters in the game.
5. Breathe, Think, Do with Sesame
Children with learning disabilities often suffer from social anxiety issues as well. Thus, this app is an excellent way for them to learn how to act in social real-life situations as well as enhance their problem-solving, self-control, planning, and task persistence skills. The child is on a journey with their Sesame Street friend to calm down and face everyday challenges.
Thus, these silly animations and playful interactions help the child imbibe the ‘Breathe, Think, and Do’ strategy which can be a huge asset in later life situations. What’s more, it even has a robust parent section with great resources for helping navigate everyday challenges with your young kid. So learn to live and laugh at Sesame Street!
6. Voice Dream Reader
Is your kid having a really tough time processing the texts? Is he or she looking for a companion to read the text aloud? Voice Dream Reader is the app for you. With powerful optical character recognition features and a hassle-free user interface, this app serves the exact needs of a dyslexic reader.
There are clear instructions to use it, and even the parents can have a fun time using it to bond with their dyslexic child. If you go for the in-app purchase, you can have the perks of better voice quality, and the overall verdict is that it is quite impressive. You can use it to read aloud stories to your kid even when you are busy thereby keeping the child engaged in the learning process.
7. Socratic App
Socratic is a popular app that aims to assist students with their homework. The app can find the relevant concepts to solve math equations in just a few seconds. All you have to do is take a pic of the homework question or math equation and submit it to get an instant explanation of the concept.
Other than Mathematics, Socratic also supports Science, History, English, and Economics. The app uses vision technology to read the submitted image and AI to figure out the concepts for solving it.
Simple but interactive UI makes it really easy to use. The ability of the machine to spit out the results in just a few seconds is pretty impressive. However, the app itself is limited by its dependence on optical character recognition.
Links: Appstore | Playstore | Web App
8. CogniFit
Developed by Neuroscientific experts, Cognifit helps train the brain’s cognitive skills by offering a collection of engaging games & activities. The app focuses on exercising memory, concentration, attention, reasoning, coordination, and mental arithmetic capabilities.
Cognifit is designed as such to test your logic and problem-solving skills at every corner. Not only individuals with attention-deficit disorder, this app also adapts to the needs of a wide range of users, including ones just starting out with developing cognitive functions and also the ones right at the end of their academics.
Link: Appstore | Playstore | Web App
9. Elevate – Brain Training Games
As your kids grow a little older, these brain-training games of Elevate can be a huge asset in their overall skill development. It helps in improving speaking abilities, processing speed, memory skills, and mental maths and thus in overall confidence and personality development.
It also has personalized workouts for the cognitive senses and performance-tracking features. In fact, even parents can benefit from this app. Time to elevate your critical cognitive abilities!
Link: Playstore | App Store | Web App
10. Otsimo
Otsimo is a special education app applauded by the Google Play Awards for Best Social Impact. It is a certified app for kids with learning deficits and other special needs. Many other awards and publications have vouched for its effectiveness. The games included in this app are designed to enhance communication skills, cognitive skills, and fine motor skills.
The app covers topics like letters and numbers, colors, animals, vehicles, etc. It also teaches struggling kids about emotions to help them understand the numerous feelings they sense every single day. You can customize the games to your child’s current abilities, make changes as they get better at learning, and receive detailed reports on your child’s progress.
Looking for a personalized learning experience? Ostimo offers you just that by setting up an exclusive learning path for your child. Download the free version of this app to gain ad-free access to its features. You can even make in-app purchases or go premium to access all that the app has to offer.
Link: Playstore | Appstore | Web App
11. Mod Math
Learning disabilities like dysgraphia or dyslexia may affect a child’s ability to write numbers correctly or impact number alignment before solving. Considering this fact, ModMath was introduced to lessen this difficulty so kids can concentrate more on finding solutions than struggling with pen and paper to write the number correctly.
The app helps with mathematical notation by providing a canvas with graph paper lines. Users can customize it with colors for better visibility. By writing numbers in individual cells of the clear canvas using a keypad, kids can get rid of the confusion involved with writing numbers and focus on performing mathematical operations.
Sharing work is also easy. Kids can send their assignments to teachers and friends through email and save them on the cloud for future use. All in all, this no-frills-attached app is a perfect tool for kids with learning disabilities as its straightforward design makes math learning easier than ever.
Wrap up
As an endnote, we would like to add that apart from tuition and special classes for kids, they also need to go for self-learning sessions. The best outcome is from the ones that the kids enjoy the most, and there is no doubt that apps and games serve that purpose. If used efficiently, the outcome these apps can provide is really unbelievable.
An engineer, Maths expert, Online Tutor and animal rights activist. In more than 5+ years of my online teaching experience, I closely worked with many students struggling with dyscalculia and dyslexia. With the years passing, I learned that not much effort being put into the awareness of this learning disorder. Students with dyscalculia often misunderstood for having just a simple math fear. This is still an underresearched and understudied subject. I am also the founder of Smartynote -‘The notepad app for dyslexia’,