Schools Are Using Voice Technology to Teach Reading. Is It Helping?
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Loading... - Minna Virtanen
- 07 Mar 2023
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A first grade student is trying to read a passage on her iPad. A digital avatar Amira, clad in olive green, is listening. Her face isn’t particularly demonstrative, but she’s trying her best with emphatic pats-on-the-back when the student gets something right. When the reader skips a word, or mispronounces it, Amira displays the kind of dispassionate instruction that only artificially created avatars can.
“Keep going,” Amira says, softly.
Amira is the invention of Amira Learning, a six-year-old edtech company that fuses voice-based artificial intelligence into reading activities, guided by an eponymous AI bot. Amira Learning is only one of a slew of edtech companies that have leveraged the advancements in voice-based AI to help improve foundational reading skills for learners from kindergarten right up to fourth grade.
These systems act as guides for students, and as they read a text, analyze their speech to identify the proficiency level of the reader. They try to replicate the experience of a teacher listening carefully and identifying potential problem areas in comprehension, pronunciation and letter recognition. Voice technology — especially the use of an AI bot that talks back to the learner — has injected reading practice with the kind of feedback that was only possible with one-on-one tutoring before.
School district leaders have taken note, developing multi-year adoption plans for their schools. At Savannah-Chatham County Public Schools (SCCPSS) in Georgia, a three-school pilot in January 2020 grew into a district-wide online and offline reading program for students across its 34 elementary schools, according to Andrea Burkiett, director of curriculum and instruction for the district.
“Between May and June of 2020, our students had collectively read 77,000 minutes on the Amira platform. During COVID, we weren’t sure what other literacy instruction they were able to get. So we were pretty happy with Amira,” Burkiett says.
When schools reopened in 2021, Burkiett and her team decided to roll out the program across the district for students in kindergarten to third grade.
“The recording feature was very advantageous because it allowed teachers to listen to students reading, even if they weren’t physically present in schools,” Burkiett says. Read More…
