Finalists for Best Special Needs Apps of 2012 announced

March 5, 2012 - PRLog -- We are pleased to announce that Smarty Ears’ apps, Articulate It! and Custom Boards have been selected as two of five finalists in the 2012 Readers’ Choice Awards for “Favorite Special-Needs App,” presented by About.com. The popular annual reader-driven awards program highlights the best products, services, and features in hundreds of categories that span across a majority of About.com’s channels from technology to hobbies.

Smarty Ears was founded in 2009 by Speech and Language Pathologist, Barbara Fernandes. Smarty Ears is an innovative company that specializes in creating mobile educational apps and has quickly emerged as the leader in creating convenient, affordable, and easy-to-use apps that serve the needs of parents, speech therapists, teachers and, students with speech, language, and hearing disabilities. Smarty Ears currently provides users with over 32 mobile apps and 3 Android apps.

“We greatly appreciate the positive responses that our products have been receiving and are humbled by the recognition About.com’s readers are giving Custom Boards and Articulate It!” said Fernandes.
Custom Boards and Articulate It! were created to help improve children’s speech and language skills. Custom Boards serves a visual support system that enables teachers, parents, and speech therapists to enhance learning for each child with special needs. The app also provides parents with an affordable way to aid their child at home, creating a link between the child’s learning environments and reinforcing the learning process. With the Smarty Symbols’ advanced and comprehensive library of over 11,000 symbols incorporated into the app, Custom Boards offers its users a pool of templates to create customized communication boards, schedules, and meaningful activities. Custom Boards was launched on October 6, 2001 and quickly became the #3 Bestselling Educational App on iTunes.
Articulate it! was created to help parents and speech therapists improve the speech of children with delays in speech. This universal app contains over 1 thousand pictures and includes all of the phonemes of the English language. Articulate it! is currently the only application on iTunes that enables speech therapists to work with a group of students simultaneously, which is a great need in school settings.


We encourage each of our users to show their support by voting for their favorite Smarty Ears’ app. To vote, visit the following link:  http://specialchildren.about.com/b/2012/02/22/vote-for-fa....

Users can vote for Custom Boards or Articulate It! once per day until March 21. About.com will announce the winner on March 30.

For more information about Articulate It!, Custom Boards, or other Smarty Ears’ products or how to vote in the poll, contact us at contact@smartyearsapps.com

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Smarty Ears was founded in december of 2009 by Barbara Fernandes, a practicing Speech-Language Pathologist certified by the American Speech and Hearing Association. Smarty Ears was the first company to create apps geared towards speech therapy for mobile devices. Smarty Ears’ first application, called Mobile Articulation Probes(name changed to Smarty Speech in 2011) was released in January of 2010 and it has helped many speech therapists to make sessions more dynamic and engaging.

Fourteen month later, Smarty Ears has created over 21 applications for children with speech and language delays and disorders such as Stuttering, articulation delays, autism, down syndrome, and language disorders. Our goal is to provide the best tools that engage every children to learn, develop appropriate communication skills and become better communicators