SUPPORTING TEACHERS AND PARENTS WITH MOBILE TECHNOLOGY TO TEACH READING

Teaching to read is a slow and complex process. It is very challenging as the student must recycle neural resources evolutionary designed for other tasks. That takes a lot of practice and perseverance. To top it all, there are two rival strategies for teaching reading that have been at war for many decades. On the other hand, unlike older students, it is much more complex to record evidence of progress since students cannot easily answer multiple-choice tests nor written open-ended ones. Much is based on observation in class as students work. Additionally, parental support is critical at that age. In this paper, we describe an app that was voluntarily adopted by 1,235 schools that supported teachers and parents to track the progress of students. We found a very rapid adoption of the app, a surprisingly big imbalance between the intended and implemented curriculum, much lower student performance in writing than in reading and oral communication, and strikingly great participation and enthusiasm of parents in creating videos to share with other parents where they show playful strategies to teach reading to their kids.