Bhavana Kohli, Educator and Tech Expert, Ahlcon Public School, Delhi shares how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can improve kids’ reading skills
Bhavana Kohli, Educator and Tech Expert, Ahlcon Public School, Delhi
We all are living in the same world but facing strange problems. It’s difficult for everyone to deal with this lockdown situation. Yes, we are in isolation and not allowed to leave our homes unless for food or other essential services.
All educational institutions including schools are closed. And from here it’ll get difficult for educators and teachers to teach effectively… but I hope we’ll get through this!
Educators and students around the world are using various tools to make learning more inclusive and accessible. Educators put together a medley of activities bundled with a set of interactive topics related to games and quizzes.
Whether that’s using simple excel to make to-do lists for students, sharing the built-in magnification tools to help those who are visually impaired, or using voice typing in to dictate lesson plans or essays.
In the meantime, I’d like to offer my fellow friends some resources that you can share with your little kids who are at home. I hope that this will bring you a little bit of joy and help a lot in distance teaching.
Interactive Digital Student Magazines
Interactive Digital Student Magazines are the new reading revolution. It is not just a plain reading experience. These magazines cater to the visual and auditory learners too. The e-magazine pages are embedded with related videos of the particular topic.
There are learners who acquire concepts through visual aids such as images and videos. There are auditory learners who grasp concepts through their listening. All these students have equal learning opportunities as the students who learn by reading.
Brainfeed Interactive Digital Magazines are a great example. They also have separate magazines for different age groups right from preschoolers to high school students and even college graduates.
AI and machine learning enable children to learn to read by providing verbal and visual feedback.
Read Along
Another recommendation is an app “Read Along” that keeps young minds engaged with a collection of diverse and interesting stories from around the world and games sprinkled into those stories.
“Read Along” uses Google’s speech recognition technology to help develop literacy skills and first launched in India (where it is available as “Bolo”).
This app collects certain types of information from users of the app, like app usage activity, photographs, and voice data. It allows multiple children to track their reading progress individually on the same device. Children’s voice data and photographs stay on the device, taking care ofdata privacy.Young learners around the globe are keen for the same app.
“Read Along” is now available in over 180 countries and nine languages including English, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Spanish and Portuguese.
“Read Along” helps kids independently learn and build their reading skills with the help of an in-app reading buddy named Diya.
As kids read out loud, Diya uses Google’s text-to-speech and speech recognition technology to detect if a student is struggling or successfully reading the passage.
She gives them positive and reinforcing feedback along the way, just as a parent or teacher would. Children can also tap Diya at any time for help pronouncing a word or a sentence.
To detect whether a student is struggling or successfully reading a passage, it uses natural language processing which in turn helps to read, decipher, understand, and make sense of the human languages in a valuable manner. It gives them positive and reinforcing feedback.
Kids can collect stars and badges as they learn which will motivate them to keep playing and reading.
Parents can create profiles for multiple readers, who tap on their photo to learn at their own pace and to track their progress. “Read Along” will personalize the experience by recommending the difficulty level of stories and games based on their reading level performance. So significantly,it improves children’s reading skills. Expansion of selection of books and adding more features in the app will be implemented depending on parents feedback from time to time.
It is easy to start and does not require sign-in and even the voice data is analyzed in a real-time device so that it can work offline and is not sent to the server.
So let’s try this and work on kid’s social and emotional learning.
