Diary Zapp: Our Review

Diary Zapp is a children’s app originally designed by the Dance family to help their children who were given the task of writing a daily Summer holiday diary for school. Shortly after starting they realised their daughter, Ella, was struggling with her literacy and Noah their eldest just wasn’t that into it meaning what was supposed to be a fun task turned into a chore. They also found that the children were keen to share what they had been getting up to with friends and family which was an extremely difficult task when using good old fashioned pen and paper.

After a discussion about possible resolutions, Noah who is 9, suggested that an app would be a great idea and would allow sharing of not only diary entries but also photos and would be a great way of keeping in touch with friends and family over the holidays. Diary Zapp was born!

Diary Zapp allows up to 5 ‘Zappers’ have keep their very own personal journal within the app. When downloaded your first task is to create and design your very own Zappicon character. This may sound like an easy task, however the choices for designing your character are vast! Firstly he or she needs a name (we named ours Babs), before moving on to choose a colour and shape you would like them to be. Then it’s on to adding eyes, ears, a nose (we really liked the elephant and carrot choices here!), and lips plus of course accessories like a moustache and wings. There are so many different options and combinations for creating your Zappicon it may take you a while! Zappicons will help guide you through your diary entries and are able to provide some inspiration if you’re stuck on what to write.

Once finished designing your Zappicon friend to help you along the way it’s straight into filling your journal. Diary Zapp allows you to complete pages not only on the current day, but also in the past which is a really great idea especially if it’s been a long day and you don’t have time to make an entry.

Each page of the diary has a whole host of customisable features starting with a large choice of background patterns and colours with more that can be unlocked as you progress with your diary entries. You can modify the text size and change the rotation and placement of what has been written on the page. It also has a fantastic feature which sees your Zappicon offering language and vocab suggestions to enhance your writing.

Once the writing section of your diary entry is complete it allows you to upload photographs and pictures as well as add stickers from a selection available with more being unlocked as you progress. We also discovered that not only are the stickers able to be added to the photos but you can also draw over and modify them which gave us a good few giggles!

When you are happy with how your entry looks you’re given the option to send it to one of your buddies. These are managed through the Adult dashboard – a password controlled area of the app. In this area you are able to see the activity of all the Zappers as well as manage pre-approved email addresses of buddies that your children can share their content with – Grandparents are always going to be top of the list here! The dashboard means that you have full control over what your child is sharing and with whom, which is just what you want as a parent. There is also an option on the dashboard to access Diary Zapp’s partner site Photobox where you can turn your diary into gifts from photo books to posters and much more – ideal as gifts for family and friends!

We absolutely love this app, in my opinion it has brought the dying art of keeping a diary bang up to date in a fun and engaging way for children (and adults!). It also allows them to keep in touch and share their adventures with those they may not see often and for me continuing communication is always a good thing, especially when it’s encouraging and enhancing literacy skills along the way. It is also a fantastic ‘modern’ way for children to store their memories safely to look back on in the future.

The app is fantastic value for money considering up to 5 users can keep a journal. It can be downloaded from the Apple Store, Google Play or Amazon

We were gifted an App download in return for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions expressed are our own.