Kutubee

What is Kutubee app?

Kutubee is an interactive leveled reading platform. Available in two account versions, one for schools and another for families, it contains nearly 1,500 books spread across English, Arabic and French languages. Within each language, the books cover many different non-fiction and fiction themes.

There are two versions of the app - Family version and School's version.

Kutubee digital platform allows it to have many useful features not possible with physical books.

Reading

• Kids can highlight text as they read and have the option to share it with their teachers.
• Kids can record themselves reading in the web app and native apps. This has multiple uses, such as preserving a snapshot of progress, letting teachers more efficiently assess kids, and letting kids listen to themselves for improvement purposes.
• A full library is available to kids who have access to Kutubee. It can be used to learn, practise, and for shared reading with parents.

Administration

• Kutubee monitors time spent reading, quiz performances, engagement and more in an easy-to-read dashboard.
• Teachers can assign books to kids remotely. Even if kids are off school, they can still receive their assignments and access the books to read.
• Teachers can use Kutubee's data to direct their support to the kids who need it most.

This review of Kutubee looks at the student and teacher tools to assess how students learn and practise with the app and how teachers monitor, evaluate, and set assignments.

What we love about Kutubee app.

Book apps are great value ways for schools to make reading material available to kids and ease the workload of teachers helping kids build their literacy skills.

Kutubee does everything you'd ask of a book app by providing a varied and full library of books, teacher support tools, and flexible access.

Kutubee provides monitoring tools to complement its large multilingual library of kids' books. These ensure kids use the app effectively and keep teachers informed. If children try to rush through a book by clicking rapidly through the pages, the app will detect that they have not read the text properly. The app will then tell kids that they need to take more time for the book to count. Should kids get wise to this and try to go slowly but pay no attention, this will be picked up by the short quiz they are asked to complete about each book they have read.

The quizzes deserve a special mention. There is a tendency in some book apps to have quizzes that only test recall of what happened in the story. The questions in Kutubee are meant to measure learners' skills based on Bloom’s taxonomy and ask kids to think a bit more deeply. 

They'll need to think about word meanings, characters' traits, and other aspects of the text alongside just the events.

The question types ensure that teachers get a better idea of how kids are progressing. With the associated pictures in books and just a limited level of reading ability, kids might be able to mask their difficulties in a pure comprehension test. The deeper nature of Kutubee's quizzes should better indicate difficulties for teachers to address.

Together, these tools keep kids learning and parents and teachers informed.

What skills does it teach?

Kutubee's primary purpose is to provide reading material for kids to develop their reading skills. As the books are available in French, Arabic, and English, a subscription to Kutubee may also be helpful for language and EAL classrooms.

The library of books will also be useful for cross-subject purposes. Kids can look at topics within science, geography, and personal reflection, among many others.

What age is it appropriate for?

The search filters in Kutubee let users select books within age ranges of 3-5, 6-8, 9-11, and 12-14. The book topics, particularly the factual ones, are relevant to the oldest age bracket, but the text tends to be at a level we'd link to younger students.

Kutubee is most appropriate for elementary and primary school kids or older children whose reading ability has not progressed to the expected level.

Is Kutubee app easy to use?

The native apps and web-app versions of Kutubee are all easy to use with only minimal differences appropriate to the platforms. A brief overview of the functions and gestures guides users when they first use the app.

Kids and teachers will find it easy to browse Kutubee's library. Each book is categorised according to subject, PYP Program, levelled reading, and age.

How much does Kutubee app cost?

Users can download the family version app for free and use it for free for a limited number of books under each age group and category. To access the full library, you will need to pay a subscription fee (monthly or annual).

Users who subscribed with their school can get full access directly from the school moderator. Schools can contact the developers for a demonstration or free trial account.

How will students benefit?

Kids need to know that they are progressing, and Kutubee does this by awarding points and recording the books that kids have read. Kids can see their statistics, such as how long they have spent reading, but they also earn badges to mark their achievements. This gamification reward style is popular with kids, and many are well motivated by it.

How will parents benefit?

Kutubee is available at a school and family level. In both cases, the reading platform will provide families with a wealth of reading material for an excellent value price. If kids have access to Kutubee through their schools, they'll be able to access all of the books from home for reading practice, reading for pleasure, and assisting with homework projects.

If parents subscribe to Kutubee, they'll have provided their kids with plenty of choices for reading. A meaningful selection of appropriate books is important in encouraging kids to develop a love of reading, and Kutubee grants this.

There are many longstanding favourites in Kutubee that make for excellent shared reading books for parents and kids or bedtime stories.

How will teachers benefit?

Teachers following the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme will appreciate having the books categorised according to this system. Teachers following other curricula will still be able to browse books using a traditional library approach.

The teacher administration tools do everything teachers might want of a reading platform. Educators can look at a complete class overview and observe the most and least engaged kids. They can also drill down to an individual level to see a more detailed view of each student's reading practice and progress.

These tools make administering a whole class of students learning to read much more straightforward than physical books and manual record keeping.

Teachers do not need to fear that their data about their students is trapped within the Kutubee platform as they can export it in the popular XLSX format for viewing in spreadsheet software and re-presenting for other reports.

As Kutubee includes books that cover topics related to school subjects, including the arts and sciences, the library of books will be a useful resource for teachers planning lessons on those topics. This breadth makes Kutubee even better value as it will help with learning to read and contribute to other subjects.

The cross-platform convenience afforded by having Kutubee available on the web and as an app gives kids the best possible chance of accessing the reading material on their home devices.

Good to know

Reading ability and age are not necessarily reflected in each other. Kutubee's age filters include a 12 to 14 option. When filtered this way, the books shown don't tend to reflect a reading level we would hope for from kids of this age. However, they would still be useful for kids working to improve.

The books within the Kutubee library are spread across three languages: English, Arabic, and French. Note that this does not mean that each title is available in all three languages. The titles vary across the languages.

The Kutubee app lets each user choose whether the interface is in English, Arabic, or French. A few minor details give away that Arabic is the app's lead language, such as the zoom slider that enlarges the page when you pull the slider from right to left rather than the other way typically seen in apps that lead with English. The app's website defaults to Arabic too. None of these is any reason to avoid the app, just small points to note.

Is Kutubee app safe to use?

All of the books viewed during this review were appropriate for kids. Many of them are familiar titles you might have seen in physical formats. Neither the web app nor native versions of Kutubee show advertisements or social media links.

The app has a privacy policy, although it is only available in Arabic. We'd like to see this extended to the other languages its library serves: English and French.

Overall rating of the app.

Kutubee is an excellent app handy for multilingual families and schools to use for kids to learn to read and to give them access to a stimulating range of reading material. Kids with a Kutubee account won't be short of entertaining books to read and will feel the satisfaction of watching their achievements build. Teachers and parents will get a clear picture of how their kids are progressing and how much reading they are doing.

With a selection of books available for family users before they even subscribe, we recommend you do just that. Read some books with your kids, encourage them to do independent reading, and monitor their progress using the convenient tools. We've awarded Kutubee five stars in this review.