As part of Verizon’s Check Into Literacy program, the Technology Enhanced Learning program of Cal State Long Beach received a $15,000 grant to boost its efforts in improving grade school children’s reading ability.
The program is centered on multimedia e-books. The e-book gives audio of someone reading it phrase-by-phrase while the words on the screen are highlighted moments beforehand, which helps the children keep pace with the reading.
The grant money from Verizon will be used through 2009 to pay for the production of more e-books to service a wider age range and for the hiring of staff to work with the children and evaluate their performances. Robert Berdan, a CSULB professor emeritus and the Technology Enhanced Learning program director, compared the reading ability of the participating children to a person who knows how to play the notes of a song without the melody – the timing is off and the song’s message isn’t understood.
“Here we give them a model of a very fluent reader … and we tell them ‘we want you to read it just like this guy did,'” Berdan said. The golden standard the program aims at for the children is to increase their proficiency in reading standard graded material that they’ve never seen before.
In one case, the program increased the children’s reading rate by 25 percent; children who weren’t in the program had an average increase of only 5 percent.
Working with the Young Men’s Christian Association’s after-school programs and sometimes directly with the Compton Unified School District and Long Beach Unified School District, has allowed the Technology Enhanced Learning program to assist lower income families, in which many of the participants are Latino and African American.
However, the lack of available computers has limited the amount of children the program can teach at a time. Berdan would like to purchas laptop computers, however, money from the grant will not be used due to the high cost. Still, for Berdan the program already fulfills a desire he’s had ever since he came to CSULB in 1983.
“I’ve wanted to do this for 25 years,” Berdan said. “You could do this but the tools were very, very expensive. Now this stuff is all just desktop and the kind of stuff that we can do working at a university environment without any specialized tools.”