Theophano Christou

Homeschooling has just finished, and students went back to school. Students in most schools used the apps at home, and they were pleased about it! We helped them by talking on the phone with them, their parents, or teachers. Researchers provided help to teachers by assigning games!

Use of iRead at home

Going back to the real school

Now, we went back to school, and as a result, we want to catch up with the pilot and use the apps as more as we can to help students with reading difficulties. We contacted teachers and started visiting schools in Ioannina to update Navigo and visit schools for help. In the image below you can see all the tablets signed up for necessary updating!

Updating Navigo at schools in Ioannina

Two virtual conference presentations themed around design and reading development

We also presented our work orally at two conferences: The first one was in DSAI (DSAI 2020, December 02–04, 2020, Online, Portugal), and the title of the presentation was: “The Design of New Digital Resources of Personalized Support of Reading Skills for Novice Readers and Children with Dyslexia: A Presentation of the iRead Software Linguistic Domain Models”. The second one was in 41th ICGL, and the title was: “Syntactic, morphological and lexical integration during sentence comprehension in Greek adult speakers and children of typical and atypical reading development”. All conferences went online, and of course, that is more difficult for interaction. We can’t see any facial expressions and other nonverbal cues, but we are happy that we can attend and present our work even that way.

Presenting at an online conference during the pandemic

Why is dissemination so important for projects such as iRead?

Dissemination is an essential part of each program. If no one ever learns about our research, people will not know what we’ve discovered. What we’ve presented about iRead is that iRead is innovative in it provides students with an extensive dataset of learning material that is carefully selected and organized to address their particular needs and also provides a personalized learning experience. It, therefore, constitutes an extremely rich toolbox for teachers, which offers a variety of applications and activities that can be helpful tools for teaching reading skills to students with or without reading difficulties.