Dost will give low-income moms a leg-up on their child’s primary school readiness and amplify the impact of existing early childhood education programs. Through short, prerecorded voice messages delivered via a call to feature mobile phones, Dost offers moms a low-cost and highly scalable approach to access the knowledge they crave and unleash their child’s potential. Dost is unique because it delivers action-oriented content and can reach illiterate moms using technology already in their hands. Dost’s theory of change is to improve educational outcomes for children by empowering functionally illiterate moms to participate in their child’s education. (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Mobiles for Reading” category)
In Malawi, “boys outnumber the girls in school attendance by a 6:1 ratio” even though primary education is free. At the same time, recent Malawian communities have seen mobile phones dramatically increase in usage. This project aims to leverage this technology to help young girls increase their literacy skills. An MMS Assisted Reading System will aid girls in educating themselves through text messages from home by delivering short story interactive lessons. Once the MMS Assisted Reading System is created, the second part of the project will be beta testing with a group on 15 Malawian girls during a three-week trial. Thereinafter, the data and feedback from this trial will serve to improve the system. The creation and trial implementation will help overcome the gender-based barriers that girls face in Malawian communities in attaining a literacy education since the MMS system will provide an alternative delivery of textual, visual, and audio reading content that can also be based on grade level or progress. By addressing the illiteracy issues in this way, young girls will have more chances at succeeding professionally, attaining higher wages, and being able to support their families. (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Mobiles for Reading” category)
While many developing countries have come a long way in increasing literacy rates, certain populations, like children in rural India, are still struggling with low literacy rates. By leveraging the power of local experiences and knowledge, Padhne.De aims to increase literacy rates through a peer-based mobile platform. Padhne.De takes an existing interactive voice response model for community communication and allows older students to record short readings and micro-lesson plans. This learning system enhances children’s reading capabilities by complementing children’s existing modes of instruction, like teachers, tutors, and textbooks. Not only will households benefit by having a program flexible with their time schedule, but they will also appreciate receiving lessons more relevant to their native tongue. Building on team-members’ existing research projects in rural India, Padhne.De seeks to implement a pilot project over the course of the Indian academic year. (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Mobiles for Reading” category)
This project will create a portable reading device – MyReadingTablet (MRT) – equipped with breakthrough WordSwitch technology, which will allow diverse learners to successfully navigate complex texts despite limited reading proficiencies. The hundreds of e-books pre-loaded on MRT will feature a variety of topics/genres to spark curiosity and maintain young children’s reading motivation. The most innovative aspect of the solar-power enhanced MRT is the reader’s ability to adjust the reading level of the e-books. Currently, most reading tablets offer unknown words to be clicked on and defined using an online dictionary, which is helpful for adult readers but somewhat impractical for beginning readers. Presently, there is no existing technology that provides for unknown words to be switched for another word, let alone a word of an easier readability with the same meaning. This aspect of MRT sets it apart from other devices and will revolutionize digital reading for beginning readers. (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Mobiles for Reading” category)
This project employs local teachers to create and teach reading materials that integrate Haiti’s mother-tongue language and native culture. At its core, it is a software application that enables writers to create books for beginning readers using a systematic phonics approach. Based on customized wordlists for sequential texts that start with the most basic letter-sound patterns and build to more complex ones, the app recommends or discourages words based on the level of reader the teacher is writing for. The books will be stored digitally on a server that students access with laptops. The project has selected Lascahobas, Haiti as its pilot location because several elementary schools there have already received laptops that are going unused. Teachers at three schools will use the app to produce books for a reading intervention program that they will then conduct over the summer. The process of creating books for their own classroom based on sound literacy acquisition principles will make them more capable of using these principles in their own classroom. (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Mobiles for Reading” category)
Gyaan is an ecosystem for collaborative, inquiry-based, leveled reading that merges task-based and storytelling approaches to increase reading comprehension in early-stage readers. To build reading comprehension for early readers in an informal, collaborative, accessible way, the project will create a system that levels texts from existing mobile libraries and recommends them based on the reader’s ability. Within the reading experience, the system will model a Guided Reading lesson with various tasks that check comprehension and encourage collaboration and conversation. These tasks and the comprehension skills and strategies, which they seek to strengthen, will align to one or two sub-tasks tested in the Early Grade Reading System (EGRA), and the system will have the option to integrate with existing mobile assessment technologies for continuous monitoring of performance on these tasks. (Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Mobiles for Reading” category)
