Momming is hard, Ello helps…
First and foremost, I am a mom. I am a mom who works full-time and often travels for work, and I am a mom who is pursuing a master’s degree. I am a mom who struggles everyday to feel like I am prioritizing my childrens’ needs while meeting the demands of work and school. So, I am a mom who must find ways to “kill two birds with one stone.” I am also a mom whose daughter has a learning disability, dyslexia. Often-times, I am a mom who feels I cannot do enough for my daughter. Enter Ello. I found Ello while researching new learning applications that use artificial intelligence for another one of my LTEC courses. As many parents can attest to, it can be incredibly difficult to get in the extra reading practice my daughter needs at the end of long school and work day. With tiredness comes short tempers. And with a child who so badly wants to be successful, me stopping her while reading to correct her, no matter how kindly I deliver the correction, often ends in tears. I want to be her cheerleader, not the old school marm with a ruler in hand correcting her every mistake. Ello is a reading app that lets me be the parent there to praise because Ello listens to my daughter as she reads and is able to detect mistakes and stop her to help her sound out the mispronounced word. As a mom, wanting to instill a love for a nightly reading routine in my children, Ello is a game-changer. Ello’s use of NLP means my daughter gets to feel successful and make incremental growth in her reading each day. We know that just listening to students read and helping them build their confidence and fluency is one the most important things we can do for novice readers. However, with growing class sizes and students arriving to classes with larger and larger learning deficits, one teacher can only do so much. I think Ello would be fabulous tool in the classroom to get every student reading everyday. One aspect not yet integrated into Ello that would be a fabulous enhancement would be to integrate an adaptive learning system that calibrates students' accuracy to the level of reader they are given. For now, this is done by the parent or teacher. Right now the system is trained only to recognize incorrect words and then help students correct their reading in real-time. A collection of this data to create a student profile and make predictions of “just right” reading content would be the way to help make it foolproof and not only get students reading but also making sure they are reading within their proximal zone of development. Go Ello!
