With 1: 1 computing initiatives occurring in school districts across the country, students never had such universal access to information. Educational innovations as "blended learning" and "flipped instruction" are changing the way teachers and students interact and learn. Even schools are becoming virtual - no physical buildings or classrooms. At the same time, millions of students can not fully benefit from these innovations, and who struggle with reading. Our national challenge is bridging the gap for struggling readers at all levels, especially among people with disabilities.
Reading challenges students with Disabilitites
With each new grade level literacy demands increase substantially - texts become longer, sentence complexity increases, content and vocabulary begins to expand exponentially. For students with disabilities, these challenges are particularly daunting.
In 2013, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reported that 91 percent of eighth-grade students with disabilities performing at or below the basic reading, with 60 percent performed below basic. In addition, students with learning disabilities read 3.4 degrees below peers who are free of disabilities. By middle school, academic achievement in various content areas inevitably depend on the ability of students to learn independently from text and express what they know via text.
Fortunately, help is on the way.
In an attempt to exploit the technology that can help struggling readers, the Department's Office of Special Education Programs of the United States (OSEP) funded the Center for Emerging Technology, Disability and Reading Middle School. The objective of this center is to leverage emerging technology in the service of reading comprehension, developing skills and improving motivation to read, so that whenever students are reading can practice and develop their skills through of "just-right" reading challenges. The center, run by the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) in collaboration with Vanderbilt University, is a large system of alliances designed to leverage and connect the most current knowledge of science learning on the development of reading in students with disabilities, best practices in education and innovation at the forefront of educational technology.
The Center's work has focused on exploring how emerging technologies can be leveraged to:
Accelerating the development of reading skills
Improving student motivation, participation and self-efficacy in relation to literacy
Improve efficiency in the use of educational resources (eg, open educational resources that increase academic learning time through text)
Udio also help middle-grade readers
The Centre is researching and developing a learning environment rich in technology called "cais" that will enable schools to provide all students with appropriate reading independently across the curriculum literacy experiences. Cais goals are simple:
Promoting a passionate interest and investment in reading for students who have traditionally been uninterested in, or deprived of their rights, traditional literacy practices in the classroom.
Substantial improvement in reading comprehension skills of high school students who have experienced recurrent failure in reading proficiency.
Udio is a dynamic network of authentic, current and widely distributed universal for Learning (UDL) reading environments design.
Reading materials available through UDIO is supplied by a network of contributors whose online is already on the web and of great interest to readers with difficult adolescents and their teachers. Current partners UDIO that provide access to reading content include Scholastic, the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the SERP Institute / Word Generation The Poses Family Foundation / History Sharing, Sports Illustrated for Kids, and Time Magazine for Kids. When completed, UDIO provide readers:
A space to explore content that provides students access to hundreds, and possibly many thousands of high-quality, high-interest items
A platform to read, discuss and gather media interest supporting the use of reading comprehension strategies, offers substantial opportunities for active and social experiences of text, and allows access to UDL support for the challenges of reading just to the right (including access to the text when the word -level reading ability is low)
A space with support for creating and sharing writing projects that leverage for development of reading comprehension skills
A system dashboard and analytics that supports students in developing an understanding of their interests and allows students to track the volume and pace of their reading experiences UDIO
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