Solving the Problem of Weak Primary Skills.

Programme READ revisits the Primary Skill Set and delivers its complete content through media in all its forms - Print, Radio, Television, Cable, iPods, Internet and through Learning Centres, Community Centres, Schools and Colleges, Hospitals and the workplace using computers.

READ targets all groups currently undertaking remediation efforts wherever they are and provides support to ensure they succeed. They include: Framers, Workers, Institutions, Community Groups.

The programme partners with media houses and corporate sponsors to join READ to prepare the knowledge worker by providing him/her with the sound foundation of Primary Skills Sets.

There are 130 million children in India’s primary schools (Grades 1-5), spread across 600,000 villages.  40% will leave schooling before completing Grade 5.  60% of these school dropouts will be girls.  Half the children completing primary education will not be able to read functionally, e.g., the headlines of a newspaper.  There are also 127 million children, below age six, likely to enter primary schooling with practically no pre-school preparation.

Most of the 257 million pre-school and in-school children will never experience reading from children’s books.  Yet, a majority of them will grow up watching cartoons, increasingly, on mobile phones and other digital media.  AniBooks make reading an inescapable by-product of cartoon viewing.

 PlanetRead and BookBox innovated the concept of an AniBook, to create a reading experience for children, in an entertaining and audio-visual form.  Essentially, AniBooks are animated stories with the narration appearing on screen as perfectly synchronized and highlighted subtitles, in the same language as the audio.  This reinforces text-sound associations that are typically weak among early-literate children. Once created in any one language, AniBooks can be adapted to other languages at a marginal cost.  Thus, AniBooks are well-suited to serve the diverse linguistic needs of India and, over time, other countries. There are already 250 million mobile subscribers in India and this figure is expected to double by 2010.  At present, PlanetRead is bringing reading to 200 million weak readers, through Bollywood film songs that are subtitled on TV in the “same” language.  In addition, we will have the potential to bring child-appropriate reading, via mobiles, to 100 million children.

Our existing project is already helping many thousands of people to build a strong vocabulary (including many on donated licenses). We are a 501(c)3 nonprofit located in Sebastopol/Sonoma, and match online memberships with free licenses for disadvantaged students. This year, we will give free licenses to all 3rd graders in the Bay Area.

At eSpindle everything is about customizing learning to one's needs, and nothing is out-of-the-box. People can add words that are important for them, and do then receive customized tutoring, where each word is matched with audio, definition, sample sentences from our 100,000 word database.

We want to create a public, free-for-all platform where users (and other smart and generous people) can share word lists, so others can use them to have an easier time academically, or with their personal goals.

This will be a huge help for English language learners, students, and people entering a new field. Such a platform would empower them to increase their verbal skills without assorting to labor intensive flash cards/word lists/manually manage their progress.

Research has shown that users need to be exposed to a new word eight times, if it is encountered randomly in a text, before they actually store it in long-term memory. One sighting is normally enough to anchor the word in memory, if the word has been properly introduced beforehand.

This mash-up could build a repository of lists that can help people find, for example:

... words one should know when going to law school
... terminology related to global warming
... terms important to genetics
... words you'll need to read Ulysses... and survive
... Shakespearean terms to get more enjoyment out of his writings, etc.
... glossaries correlating with common text books (in all academic fields)
... lists assorted by subjects, to help English language learners build their vocabulary (body parts... herbs... cooking terms... internet lingo...)

If some of you have learned English as a second language, you know that it is a hard language to learn. Some say that 13% of all English words are illogical, meaning the spelling or pronunciation do not make sense.

eSpindle was designed to make the process more efficient and pain-free, and a word list mashup will help people manage their progress, accelerating their success.