HP Print Apps - Printing made Easy

(Daddy blogs)

Last week I reviewed the HP OfficeJet 6700 Premium and if you didn't have time to read it, no worries... let both Ash and Ayd summarize it into a single word for you. 

AWESOME.

I suppose the sight of them hogging the printer almost every night is testament to what they thought of it. And the culprit? Print Apps by HP.

Print Apps are special print applications available exclusively for use on HP Web-enabled printers. A Print App is a shortcut to printing content from the Web directly from your printer. No computer required.

Best of all, Print Apps are free of charge and give you direct access to great pre-formatted content from HP and leading companies from around the world, like Dreamworks, Crayola and Rovio (of Angry Birds fame). 

Not only can one print out 2D activities like brainteasers, puzzles and colouring pages, you even print out 3D modeling kits like these to keep the kids totally occupied.

So the boys are constantly discovering new crafts and other activities to print directly from the HP printer, all these without having to sit in front of a computer. But as you would probably have also read in my previous review, Print Apps are not solely about fun.

About 2 weeks ago, HP announced its collaboration with leading education publisher, Singapore Asia Publishers Pte Ltd (SAP), and one of Singapore’s proprietary Primary Math programme brand owners, onSponge, to deliver high-quality education content directly to students and busy parents through Print Apps on HP web-connected printers.

The education Print Apps offer a free service that allow parents to directly print education content on demand or schedule for HP delivery at a specific day and time of the week.

SAP is a leading publishing group specializing in academic materials such as supplementary workbooks, guidebooks, textbooks, reference books, dictionaries and other educational materials.

The SAP education Print App offers content which has been handpicked from SAP’s own best-selling primary school assessment books. To make for a balanced use of time, the Print App offers up to four pages of assessments per subject daily from Mondays through Thursdays. These one-sheet-per-day practice materials - all aligned to the latest curriculum taught in Singapore’s classrooms - more palatable to a kid compared to heavy chunks of information and exercises, which in turn encourage good study habits and positive learning by pacing children’s learning through daily practice. 

Each assessment paper comes complete with full answers, which enables students to self-access themselves after each practice or have their parents explain the answers and solutions to them. Parents can plan for scheduled delivery of these assessments on their printers each day, or opt to receive them on a weekly basis every Friday. Closer to examinations, parents can also choose to print mock exam papers for practice purposes.

The onSponge Learning Print App will provide more Singaporean students with access to the brand’s highly sought-after +hinkingMath™ resource, exclusively put together in a weekly printables format. The weekly print apps serve to provide parents and educators an additional avenue to access structured resources relevant to children from Primary 3 to Primary 6 whose repertoire of practice problem sums should ideally hone their solving skills with core techniques and the development of reasoning abilities.

The SAP print app is now available for download free of charge for owners of HP Web-connected printers while the onSponge print app will be available later this year.

And since I was provided with the HP OfficeJet 6700 Premium earlier, I was invited down as a guest panelist for the media launch to share my personal experience of using the printer and more importantly, the Print Apps.

Just ask any parent with primary-school going children and I believe one of the biggest challenges is the discernment of the vast amount of assessment books and practices out there in the market today. I think I am beginning to spend more time in Popular rather than in a men's fashion store because quite simply, there are too many choices in the bookstore, and as much as I am afraid of over-taxing my monkies with the huge amount of exercises, the kiasu mentality sometimes inevitably consumes me too as I worry if they are getting the adequate and correct practice that they need.

So the good thing about the SAP and onSponge Print Apps is that it is convenient and follows a planned schedule. It gives daily bite-sized worksheets that my kids are able to complete it in under 15-20 minutes. Which is not overly daunting and they are able to derive greater satisfaction in completing one page everyday instead of many pages in an assessment book in one sitting.

But wait, there's more! Adults are not forgotten in the wonderful world of Print Apps. In fact, there are tons of other Print Apps available ranging from Business, Documents, Productivity to Puzzles apps. Just visit the ePrintCentre to view more Print Apps!

If you are shopping around for a printer for family use, I would definitely recommend a web-connected printer from HP. Printers across the various brands nowadays differ little when it comes to printing quality and speed. So if you are looking for more value-added features, or simply put, more bang for your buck, the free-to-use Print Apps from HP puts HP Printers in a league of its own.

Besides the HP Officejet 6700 Premium, the HP ePrint and Print Apps features are also available in the HP Photosmart Printer Series - HP Photosmart 5520, HP Photosmart 6520and HP Photosmart 7520.