Celebrate World Book Day with The Literacy Project
Posted by Anne Meyer, Chief of
Education Design, CAST
According to UNESCO, one in five adults is illiterate, with the
majority living in the developing world—where access to books,
libraries, and education is often limited. But the barrier to
literacy isn’t simply a question of access, nor is it limited to
the developing world. It’s a problem we see in the U.S. as well.
People may struggle to read for lots of reasons. Some of these have
to do with basic literacy skills, such as inadequate
vocabulary.
Sometimes readers have trouble "decoding" what that
string of letters on a page really means–they might have reading
disabilities, for example. Readers may not have enough background
knowledge about a story’s characters, geography, or culture.
At the Center for Applied Special
Technology (CAST), an educational nonprofit near Boston, we
have spent the past two decades working to leverage the potential
of personal, digital technologies to customize educational media to
meet individual needs. In celebration of World Book Day, CAST has
created a powerful new tool,
id="b1_635" >UDL Editions, that showcases how
classic and sometimes difficult texts—such as Shakespeare’s 18th
Sonnet and Jack London’s Call of
the Wild—can be rendered in smart, reader-friendly ways to
provide a whole host of learning supports—such as multimedia
glossaries, chapter summaries, and read-aloud features, links to
Google Maps to place settings in contemporary contexts.
The books are one of the
projects being featured starting today on
href="http://google.com/literacy"
>The Literacy Project, a joint
effort by Google, LitCam, and UNESCO’s Institute for Lifelong
Learning. The project encourages literacy and reading organisations
from around the globe to connect and share materials and best
practice—from a searchable maps database to e-learning tools—like
PlanetRead’s same-language subtitling videos—that can be used in
the classroom.
We’re really excited to be participating in the project. Come join
us on the site and
your thoughts!
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