Posts Tagged ‘Reading Literacy’

Educating the Dyslexic Child – Do We Expect Too Much?

Here we are in the 21st Century using a system of Education, a system that was originally designed in the time of the Renaissance, and we are confronted with the challenge of Dyslexia.

That being the case, what do we attempt to do? Yes, we attempt to recreate the wheel.

While I do not want to over-simplify the situation, and I must certainly bow to the knowledge of the experts, to me it appears that we are demanding that those 1 in 8 children with Dyslexia learn another language before we provide them with The Gift of Education – and that is the Language of Text.

If a family decides to move to live in another country where another language is spoken, they expect and plan to be confronted by their children having to learn another language before they can effectively attend school – but surely not in our own country!

In many ways it is ridiculous as expecting a person to learn how to catch and prepare fish before they have a right to eat it.

Visual Learning opens the doors for a child with Dyslexia, and yet we want those with the severest cases of Dyslexia to be removed from school, and placed in special schools for Dyslexic students when the reality is that many, many of these students are extremely intelligent, and simply need to be given an alternative to the textbook.

And the story gets much worse because many of the parents, when they attempt to get those children into those special schools, either find there is no spare places available, or that the costs are prohibitive.

Delivering the curriculum content that the child is required, and often wants to learn and study, by means of audio visual delivery is such a straight forward solution for many of those kids. And the technology is now available to do just that – and it’s available online.

The use of subtitled online educational video developed specifically for the K to 12 curriculum, enables those students to absorb and process the same information being studied by their peers, by watching and listening to video. And the icing on the cake for those with milder forms of dyslexia can use the video subtitles – otherwise known as closed captions – to improve their reading and literacy skills.

For the vast majority of dyslexic students this is a very real and meaningful alternative solution to the use of textbooks, but the significant benefits of using this method, lies in the fact that they can see the words, hear how they are pronounced and from there start to learn more about correct sentence structures, the appropriate context in which to use word and much more.

While many companies are now introducing the use of online educational video, this is not enough, and only one company has taken this to the level where they have added the all-important subtitles in the appropriate manner, to content specifically developed to teach a wide range of topics as required by the K-12 curriculum.

Zane Education is a company that many teachers, schools, parents and dyslexic students themselves are now turning to because they provide a service that delivers this effective Visual Learning service online.
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