#300 – ReadM, with Oren Farhi and Dr. Hope Blecher

If you are listening to the podcast with your instructional team or would like to explore this topic more deeply, here are guiding questions to prompt your reflection:

• What was your experience with learning to read?
• Have you known students who have struggled with reading?
• How can a tool like ReadM help students improve their reading proficiency?
• What aspects of ReadM empower learners, teachers, and families?
• What is your biggest takeaway from the stories shared by Oren and Dr. Blecher?

• ReadM (official webpage)
• ReadM – Reading Confidence (Google Play Store)

#300 – ReadM, with Oren Farchi and Dr. Hope Blecher

AVID Open Access

46 Min

Keywords

ReadM, literacy, education, confidence, reading aloud, gamification, immediate feedback, multisensory learning, multilingual support, AI assistant, student progress, teacher assessment, family communication, summer slide, learning bundles.

Transcript

Oren Farchi 0:00
First of all, I created ReadM in order to help my children gain more confidence in speaking out loud, speaking English.

Dr. Hope Blecher 0:08
The joy of that is that the teacher no longer has to be removed from the room and I have to hire a substitute so that the teacher can administer this one-on-one testing.

Winston Benjamin 0:21
The topic for today’s podcast is ReadM, with Oren Farchi and Dr. Hope Blecher. Unpacking Education is brought to you by avid.org. AVID believes that school is the center of every community. To learn more about AVID, visit their website at avid.org.

Rena Clark 0:46
Welcome to Unpacking Education, the podcast where we explore current issues and best practices in education. I’m Rena Clark.

Paul Beckermann 0:57
I’m Paul Beckermann.

Winston Benjamin 0:58
And I’m Winston Benjamin. We are educators.

Paul Beckermann 1:02
And we’re here to share insights and actionable strategies.

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 1:07
Education is our passport to the future.

Winston Benjamin 1:12
Our quote for today is from Kofi Annan. He says, “Literacy is the bridge from misery to hope for everyone everywhere. Literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right.” What do y’all think about that quote? Paul, Rena?

Paul Beckermann 1:32
Alright, I’ve got my English teacher hat on, and metaphors are screaming at me here. Literacy is a bridge. I love that, because literacy literally does bridge us from one place to another place of possibility. I also thought there’s some other metaphors in here, though. Literacy as a foundation, I think that could work, because it is foundational, and literacy as an open door, right? Because it gives us access to these other opportunities. So I just think there’s a lot of hope in this too. And our guest is Dr. Hope, so that’s perfect.

Rena Clark 2:06
[Laughs] No pun intended there, of course.

Paul Beckermann 2:09
Well, there was a pun intended there. [Winston laughs]

Rena Clark 2:16
I agree with you, Paul. I like that idea. But when, I think when it’s called out that literacy is a basic human right, it serves kind of as a call to action and thinking about the inequalities in education that exist. So, how is it that we’re going to work together, how are we going to make it happen so that we can bring literacy to everyone so we can create those foundations, and create those bridges, and open those doors so that we can make it more accessible to everyone. Because I think there’s a misconception that it is accessible for everyone right now.

Winston Benjamin 2:52
I so agree, and I’m so glad we all said that, because literacy is one of those terms that reaches across everything. You have digital literacy. You have your literacy of all ways that helps an individual understand, and break, and interpret. So I’m glad we’re using this concept to help dig into this idea of what literacy is. And I’m so excited to, again, welcome Oren Farchi and Dr. Hope Blecher to the show. Oren is senior software engineer and founder of ReadM, and Dr. Hope is the VP of education and the English language advisor for ReadM. Could you take a moment and introduce yourselves for our listeners, please, each of you?

Dr. Hope Blecher 3:31
So, hi, I am Dr. Hope Blecher. I have been in education for 39 wonderful years. It is not only my career, it is who I am and what I am, and I continue to embrace it. But one thing I want to say about your quote, which is beautiful, and I wrote it down, is that literacy is not one thing. So, literacy is multifaceted. There’s very much a perception if someone says you’re literate, that means that you can read and write. But also literacy means, in addition to reading and writing, it means viewing, listening, and speaking. And those are additional components that are part of what Oren and I mean when we say that we are building a reader’s and writer’s confidence, we are also including viewing, listening, and speaking, and those are important components, are facets of the word “literacy” that are often overlooked.

Paul Beckermann 4:29
I love that, because when I was the English department chair and we did our scope and sequence, we had those specific categories within the scope and sequence for EL.

Dr. Hope Blecher 4:39
You got an A plus already. Go to the head of the class. [Laughs]

Paul Beckermann 4:43
Wow, there’s always a first, so, very good.

Rena Clark 4:44
Paul going above and beyond.

Winston Benjamin 4:47
I know, right? Showing us up, Paul. Showing us up.

Paul Beckermann 4:52
Okay, okay. Oren, you gotta tell us a little bit about yourself too, right?

Oren Farchi 4:57
Yeah. So, hi everyone. My name is Oren Far-hay or Far-hee, as we tell it sometimes. I’m a senior software engineer for almost over 20 years now, been consulting to many companies, been doing workshops. I do coding. I love coding. It’s like a game for me. I love to build the useful apps that, you know, solves an issue and do useful stuff for others. I’m also an author of a development and architecture book. And I am, yeah, the founder of ReadM, as we call it. It’s like hear-em, see-em, read-em; this is how we pronounce it. And yeah, it’s kind of like a game of, a gaming of words, maybe like “rhythm,” as in music. We want it to be something like that, playful. And I am the founder of another thing, which is called four kids, who I relocated with my wife on 2018 to the States, and this is where we first struggled, the term that you call literacy. And I couldn’t agree more that literacy is some kind of a bridge for us. That bridge was a little bit broken because my kids and I were struggling with communication, either speaking, reading, or writing. But, thankfully, this is where and how and why, actually, ReadM started. And we’re here to and happy to speak about our journey with that and maybe how we can help others who are also struggling with the same problems.

Dr. Hope Blecher 6:49
And it’s actually through that struggle that Oren and I met. So there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, a rainbow at the end of the bridge, whatever saying and cliche, but also very heartfelt.

Oren Farchi 7:03
A beautiful rainbow, yeah.

Paul Beckermann 7:05
Well, maybe we should have you talk about how you met, then, since you mentioned that.

Dr. Hope Blecher 7:10
So I was a teacher at a school in New Jersey, and I was brought in to work with the students who did not speak English. So at that time in New Jersey, they were called, the teacher was called an ESL teacher. The students were called ELLs. Now every few years, those initials change and mean something else. Sometimes it’s MLL, multilingual learner; ENL, English as a new language learner. Regardless of the label, I worked with Oren’s children because I was told that they don’t speak in class. Well, they did nothing but speak with me. So it was a beautiful thing. They spoke. They just felt very uncomfortable in the larger group, and they felt very frustrated that their teacher did not understand them and in some respect didn’t have the patience. So that’s not so much unusual when students and families come to a new country, and they feel that they’re either misunderstood or that there are so many other students, that they have someone, or, they need someone that they feel more connected with. So I fortunately was that someone to meet Oren’s, three of his four children at the time. And, you know, I feel blessed that I did, and I don’t mean that in a hokey way, because they really did have something to contribute. It was 2 years before COVID, so I had them for a year, and then another year, and then we went into COVID. And very much with Oren’s support, they very much adapted to life online and life on Zoom. The frustrating part for Oren is there is a unwritten rule in many schools where you have to read for 15 minutes, at least 15 minutes every night, and that’s how you improve your reading. So Oren was told, and his wife, Adi, read with your children every day for 15 minutes to improve their English. And as he is saying, he didn’t feel comfortable because he’s reading English, so therefore he couldn’t convey that to his own children. And it is out of that frustration that he birthed child number five, which would be ReadM.

Rena Clark 9:23
I just want to rewind a little bit. I love to hear the origin story, but it would be great if we could just talk to the listeners so we have some context. What is ReadM? How does it work? It’d just be great to have that context as we go forward.

Oren Farchi 9:39
Awesome. So I’ll take that question, certainly. Because, first of all, I created ReadM in order to help my children gain more confidence in speaking out loud, speaking English. So, obviously, sitting around the table at dinner trying, promoting them to speak English with my bad English, and, quite funny now, that wasn’t a good use case, sending them to read a book or just to flip pages and trying to pretend as if they’re reading a book. It gives me and my wife like 15 or 20 minutes of silence at home at evening time, which was great, but we didn’t know whether the kids were reading or, you know, having any practice or understood anything of what they’re doing. So this is why I created ReadM. Now, ReadM, before I dive into how I got it, ReadM is a web application. It is accessible via a URL address, a web address, readM.app. And you simply need to go to that address. There’s also an app on the Play Store at the moment. You log in, and all you have to do is read the text that is displayed onscreen. We use the concept of books or short stories, and there is an icon of a microphone. You need to click on that microphone and read out loud the sentence that is attached to it. Now, you can say a lot of stuff that are not written on or displayed on the screen, but it won’t highlight those words. Once you complete the sentence, you’ll get one coin. You get a beautiful feedback, saying, “Yay, you got it” or “Good job,” or whatever is out there in the app. And you get to move to the next sentence. And this is essentially what is ReadM for readers, for beginning readers or those that already began reading, is practicing reading aloud with fun, like, with having a gamified experience of reading.

Dr. Hope Blecher 11:55
The other part that is also, that, as students gain proficiency and work with their teachers or their parents, because it can be used in school and outside of school, they can also start writing books that their classmates can read. So as they gain confidence, they can become writers of the classroom eLibrary and illustrators. So it’s multifaceted as well, that I may like to write, and say, for example, Oren may like to illustrate, so we can become coauthors or author/illustrator. So, it continues in a very realistic way that authors work and illustrators work.

Paul Beckermann 12:39
That’s really cool.

Oren Farchi 12:40
Now, that’s the one note I would like to add. That’s the most simple, I would think, goal for ReadM, coming from a student or a reader perspective. We have more when we come into the teacher perspective, and I think we may speak about it a little more. But yeah, go ahead, Paul.

Winston Benjamin 13:02
Before we jump on, I just got one question. Yes, great to the coin at the end of the sentence, but if a student gets a word, mispronounces a word, is there feedback on that to support the development of that? Because, again, being a Jamaican, there’s certain words that I can’t say because of my parents’ accent. Like, I have to think about how to say “certificate,” because it comes out ridiculously incorrectly. So like, do we have that kind of feedback?

Oren Farchi 13:32
Yes, yes. So, absolutely, we have actually two, I would say, indicators. One, we call it something like an encouragement. So once you don’t, you don’t have that success where you read the sentence fully, something would say, “Never mind, maybe next time, try again.” So that gives the indication that you haven’t completed the sentence. The other visual indication is that each word is highlighted. So if the word is not highlighted, it means you haven’t pronounced it, or maybe you mispronounce it. And you do have the possibility of either listening to the entire sentence in a natural voice that we we’ve added. Or you can click or tap on one word and listen to how it is pronounced. And then you get to play that game again and read out loud, or speak out loud the sentence or the word.

Winston Benjamin 14:36
Thank you.

Paul Beckermann 14:37
Yeah, that immediate feedback is really powerful, because the teacher does not have time to sit there with every student as they’re reading every word. But here now the ReadM app is doing it for them and with them, right?

Oren Farchi 14:49
Correct.

Dr. Hope Blecher 14:49
And it’s also that the teacher, say, for example, any of us, can pre-record their voice as the word of encouragement. So, you know, initially it would be the voice of AI or the voice of the program, the app, but there is the capability that the teacher of a student who’s using it, and we have many students these days who are on home instruction, or they’re either traveling or they’re missing school, maybe for a health reason, that they can still feel connected to the teacher and to the class by, oh, that’s my teacher telling me I did a good job. Because they can record their voice. And that goes a long way.

Paul Beckermann 14:50
Cool. So this is maybe a question for Oren. You talked about what inspired you to create ReadM, but can you talk a little bit about the journey from that initial frustration, you know, with helping your children learn to read to the development of the software itself?

Oren Farchi 15:48
Sure, sure. That that journey began right when we came into the States. We received feedback from school that, like Dr. Hope mentioned, my kids are not speaking out loud. We don’t hear them at class. They don’t try harder. They need to try, and they need to read, and so forth. And suddenly, 3 months into the school year, we were invited into a teacher conference, and then again we get the same feedback. We’re not hearing your children, they’re not speaking, they’re silent, they don’t want to speak. We try to show them some animations. We work with some application, but it doesn’t work. So as a software engineer, I thought to myself, what I can do in order to support my kids? Because it’s becoming a nightmare. The kids are struggling. They’re frustrated. What can I do with that? One day, I took my son to soccer practice, and suddenly I had, what do you call it, an epiphany? Is that the word? Yeah. So I said, okay, I know how to transcribe a voice and to try and see what the text that they would say would be like. So what if I’ll transcribe one sentence, I’ll ask them to say it out loud, and then I’ll give them something like a reward. So what I did is, one time my daughter, who was five back then, she came home from school and she told us, in our native language, in Hebrew, she said, “I learned a sentence in English.” I said, “Okay, tell us.” She said, “It’s time to clean up and go home.” I said, wow, that is amazing. This is the sentence that everyone wants to say from when they come to school until the end of the day. [Winston laughs] But she loves school anyway. But we told her, “Okay, we want you to say that again so we can, you know, send that to our parents and friends” and so forth. She said, “No, I don’t feel like it, I’m shy,” and so forth. So I thought, in that drive that I took my son into soccer practice, I thought what I can do in order to convince her to say that. So I did what every, I think, parent might actually do, and I took a picture of what every girl at the age of five, almost, I wouldn’t say every, would love at their age is, and that is a really colorful unicorn. [Winston laughs] And I took that picture, and I transformed it into a black-and-white picture, and I told her, “Do you remember that sentence, It’s time to clean up and go home?” She said, “Yay.” I said, “Okay, so if you’re gonna tell it one more time out loud, this unicorn will transform into a colorful one, and you’ll get a coin.” She said, “Wow. Really?” I said, “Yeah.” And the next thing you know, for the next couple of hours, she and the two older brothers are sitting in front of the computer and just repeating that sentence over and over again, because I put a grade over there. So they were competing with each other just for one sentence. I said, all right, okay, this may become boring. I need to think of more sentences. And, to make a long story short, this is where we came up with having short stories, selecting some stories from the public domain, making up our own stories. And I think Dr. Hope may agree and may tell a little bit more about the public story, the public domain stories that we use. And probably the writing side of ReadM, because now it has become not only just a tool to read out loud but also a tool to write and create stories within it and then let others read it out loud. And that’s the real story behind ReadM.

Rena Clark 20:18
Wow, thank you for sharing that story. I just think this is, we talk about using the power of computer science or thinking to solve problems, and this is like such a unique example of that, where you were able to take your strengths that you brought and then create something to solve this problem that was true to you and your family, and then others are benefiting from this problem-solving. So thank you so much for sharing that story. And you’ve talked about how it’s now transformed into something that’s used in the classroom, so using at home and classroom. So how might ReadM, we’re going to kind of talk about, how could it be used in the classroom setting now, beyond just at home, for families?

Dr. Hope Blecher 21:06
So, it has, in my hats as an administrator and as a teacher, it has multiple uses. So, I’ll start. As the administrator, I can ask the teacher for real-time information about their reader, and it’s right there on the platform. They can tell, they can share with their teaching team or they can share with me, and in turn, sometimes it’s a parent who’s called, sometimes it’s preparing for a parent-teacher conference, sometimes it’s for a state or national report. And it has it right there. It stores it. They don’t have to then go to multiple places and gather it. So, we are required to have multiple data points to make decisions about students, and often we would have to collect them from different places. This has it there: which words they read correctly, what errors they make, what their success rate is, what their speed of fluency is, so it’s in one place. And the joy of that is that the teacher no longer has to be removed from the room and I have to hire a substitute so that the teacher can administer this one-on-one testing, because it’s happening as the student is reading out loud on a daily basis. So, I have students as a, in my teacher hat, who, I would hear them read. I would hear them speak. When they have to do it formally, it’s like, [Gasps]. They just freeze. And you can dangle as many coins as you want sometimes, and they just, they get more nervous. So this assessment is happening, and you’re gauging their progress and finding out about their challenges in a, what becomes a natural way. So therefore, it’s also more accurate. It’s not that you’re doing something for a test or for a grade. It’s happening—and all that data is there; it’s based on the Fry word list, the Dolch word list, so it’s based on things that are tried and true. It’s based on doctoral student research. It’s not a flavor of the month. It’s not a fad. So therefore it’s something that can stay and be used consistently. It’s not, “Oh, well, now we have a new boss, or now we have new this, so we have to throw this out.” It becomes part of what, an action in the classroom. And the benefit to that is we know now that there are families that may travel, families that sometimes, you know, the dynamics are different. There could be a divorce, a separation, a move. And for this, they just need the app and the device. It’s not “Oh, I forgot my book. Oh, I forgot my assignment, so therefore I can’t do it.” It very much makes it accessible. So as a teacher, it enables the learning to happen wherever the child is, and as the parent, it, as Oren was saying, it was a very frustrating time of silence when they were supposed to read for 15 minutes, and you’re assigning reading logs, and you’re hoping they do. That onus is now off, so it’s a night—It’s much calmer now for that parent and student and teacher relationship.

Winston Benjamin 24:27
I appreciate that.

Dr. Hope Blecher 24:28
It’s very positive.

Winston Benjamin 24:28
You kind of mentioned, as you were speaking, about some of the theories that popped up, and like, again, in education, the best and worst thing about is that we have to credentialize everything. We have to justify why this and why that. As you gave your examples of how, who should be, and how they would utilize this, but can you give us a solid base of what’s the research and learning theory behind ReadM, right? So just as a way to help our audience recognize that it’s not just a loving father doing the best that he can for his children, but that that action is also justified through education. You know what I mean? Does that make sense in why I would ask that question?

Dr. Hope Blecher 25:14
Yeah.

Oren Farchi 25:14
Yeah, absolutely. I would speak from the parent point of view. It’s not a cliche; I do believe it, that practice makes perfect. If you do not read, if you do not listen to something, you won’t absorb anything of that. And I truly believe, like, you know, I have those guitars behind me, and Paul would agree, if we don’t practice for quite some time, we’re gonna be rusty with our playing. And I see that almost the same with reading and writing. If we don’t actually practice, it doesn’t matter. We can sit and, you know, I’ll take the basketball example. We can sit on the couch and watch basketball games for hours. It won’t make us better in playing basketball. We need to go to the field and shoot some hoops and play and dribble and try the ball. And this is what I think I was trying to do for my kids, not just listening, but rather actually use the whole body and get into that immersive experience of reading out loud, you know? Trying to activate those memory muscles, the voice muscle, and to really read and speak out loud, and try to pronounce what they feel and how they feel words need to be said or actually how to say that. And this is from, you know, just a personal research, nothing in theory or reading in books.

Dr. Hope Blecher 26:59
But it is theory based. It is theory based. So there is the multiple meaning theory. There’s the kinesthetic theory that they’re using their voice, they’re using their eyes, they’re using their muscle memory. It also has the constructivist theory that they are constructing the meaning and they are constructing their sense of success. There’s research about building one’s confidence in order to try and try, to stick with something and feel, “I can do it. I can do it.” There’s also a book; it’s called “What Do We See When We Read?” I’ve enjoyed reading it as an adult. And the sense of sight, so, Oren has embedded visual applications into this. And the sense of hearing. So it’s multisensory with a purpose, and that all comes together so that the student sees their success, they hear it, and they get to try again. So it’s not “You were wrong.” There’s no angry voice, there’s no red letters and things like that. It’s very much let’s build you up to keep trying in a very authentic way, so that they then have the confidence. There’s a lot of research about your affective domain, so it’s, and how that impacts how you will do under certain, in certain situations. So all of that comes together, as well as information about learning a new language. Learning a new language very much is auditory. You need to hear it in order to be able to speak it. And embedding that in ReadM is another point of research for why it’s successful.

Paul Beckermann 28:42
And you also mentioned earlier that the word choices that you picked from came from some of those well-referenced lists as well, right?

Dr. Hope Blecher 28:51
Yeah, Dolch list and Fry list are the basics of pieces of literature. For example, the most common words. Also, Dr. Seuss, who some people will read, and, you know, some people enjoy; some people have those books memorized. But, you know, that repetition is what makes students able to repeat them and memorize them, and it much then becomes a song, so that it becomes their comfort level. And then they say, “I’m a reader now.”

Paul Beckermann 29:20
Mhm.

Rena Clark 29:21
I can remember my daughter learning “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” long before she could actually read the words and could—every single . . . [Laughs]

Dr. Hope Blecher 29:31
[Laughs] One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. And the fun thing about it is it’s also available in multiple languages. So then they want to, they want to say, “Look, I can read, I can write. Will you let me show you? Will you let me share with you?”

Winston Benjamin 29:49
I know that sometimes you can have a baby and you want the greatest thing for your baby. Y’all have had, y’all created a baby, ReadM. What’s next for ReadM, and what is your goal moving forward? How would you like to see your child grow?

Oren Farchi 30:08
That’s a very good question, and we’ve only mentioned some of the teacher perspective that we do have in ReadM, and we try to, we have that nice word, empower teachers. And we actually do want to make teachers’ lives easier. So we provide the real-time assessment in reading and writing. We provide the statistics. And we have some AI features built into ReadM. So we do have some kind of an AI assistant that a teacher would get, in which this AI would be able to provide with a list of words for any student, according to their, to their progress, to write and present adaptive stories that each student would have or would need to practice in order to move into the next level. We do have an AI assistant. Maybe some of the listeners have heard about ChatGPT. So we do have a fine-tuned model, a very customized and personalized model, which is safe to use in our platform in order to generate stories according to, you know, any context that one would like to see. We do want to have multilanguage support. We now support two more languages, Spanish and Hebrew, and we want to expand that. We are working on a special feature which is called Learning Bundles, which means we want to present a learning bundle which would let you progress like a game, from one level into another in a gamified way. Currently, we support stories, but we want to gamify it a little bit so you can move from one level into another in a nice way. You know, we haven’t spoken about the fun things that we can do with money. After all, the readers earn coins. So what do they do with that? So currently, they can buy avatars inside—it’s not real money, of course; it’s gamified money—they can buy avatars or doodles that are floating around the app. We want to do more of these things, something like animate those avatars and do some more, you know, fun stuff, where the readers would have more incentive in practicing that reading aloud. We want to have a collaborative development with curriculum creators, which we already have with some of them, but we want to create personal libraries that fit each and every school or district. We know that some districts are using specific curriculums in order to progress on their literacy journey, and this is where we want to support that, and collaborate with others as well.

Winston Benjamin 33:27
Thank you.

Paul Beckermann 33:28
Awesome. Yeah, that’s great. So we’ve been talking about one great tool the whole time here, ReadM, or “read-em,” and we’re gonna hop into our toolkit and talk about some more.

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 33:40
Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What’s in the toolkit? What is in the toolkit? What’s in the toolkit? Check it out.

Paul Beckermann 33:51
All right, toolkit time! Winston, what would you like to drop in your toolkit today?

Winston Benjamin 33:56
Gamification of things for kids. The tool is, “Yeah . . . I don’t want to do it, but it’s kind of fun, so I’m gonna do it.”

Rena Clark 34:05
I mean, your 5-year-old daughter and it sounds like your sons were into that unicorn going from black-and-white to color. And it worked.

Winston Benjamin 34:14
Right? So, just, like, having fun.

Paul Beckermann 34:17
Hey, and when you said “unicorn,” Rena’s eyes, like, lit up. She was ready to play the game, like, now. [Laughs] Don’t play innocent, Rena; I saw it.

Rena Clark 34:29
I happen to have a daughter that’s very much into unicorns. And I think both of my boys would probably get into it too, I don’t know.

Winston Benjamin 34:34
That’s what I’m saying, just remember to have fun. Remember to have fun in the hard work.

Paul Beckermann 34:39
Rena, how about you? Toolkit.

Rena Clark 34:41
For me, hearing this story makes me think how important it is to communicate with our families. And from family communication, and then collaboration, and the two of you working together to create something. And knowing our families have strengths, and they really care about doing well for their kids. And so, how are we supporting each other on this journey? Just, how important it is to communicate with families.

Paul Beckermann 35:06
Yeah, and I would say the thing that stands out for me is one of the aspects of ReadM, and that’s that immediate feedback. Immediate feedback is so key to learners. If, like, I used to, I was an English teacher, and if I had to grade a paper and the student had to wait 5 days, 10 days to get that paper back, it was meaningless by that time. They need that feedback now when they’re doing it, so they can change course and correct course, right, as they’re going and improve. So I think that’s really fantastic. And I think AI is really helping us in that area too. I mean, it’s making some of these platforms more responsive, like ReadM. Oren and Hope, do you have any tool you want to drop in? It could be a feature of ReadM, it could be something else, could be a strategy. It could be whatever you want. Anything you want to add?

Dr. Hope Blecher 35:54
I have to say of all my years in education, I was inundated with different things. Try this, try this, try this. That became belaboring. And I have to say, really, the ease with which Oren takes his expertise and came at it from the parent point of view, to me, makes the difference in this. That I may have, you know, I contributed the administrative layers of the data part, what do teachers and administrators want to see. But it originated with him saying, I want something easy for my students to use that makes them feel that they’re progressing and, in turn, helps our family function, and, you know, relieve some of that stress, which I think happens continually, on a daily basis, in some situations, so that students hate reading. Or families, it becomes a begrudging time. So I really think that that is what makes this work.

Paul Beckermann 36:50
Oren, anything you want to add?

Oren Farchi 36:51
Yeah, yes. So actually, this is the second story for the origins of ReadM, but it came out really later, like that Star Wars series that you have over there. So my daughter, which was once five, this year, she is in the fourth grade, and she had a task. I mean, her whole class had a task: Learn how to spell 13 or 14 words. And now, okay, that is a mission for ReadM platform. So out of that struggle, we came up with another tool, which is called SpellM. Like ReadM. So you need to spell out loud words, I mean, to spell out and say out loud letters, and it will give you feedback, whether you’re right or wrong. And you can continue to the next word.

Rena Clark 37:46
I could use that now. [Laughter]

Oren Farchi 37:47
And I’m happy, I’m happy to say that she did all the 14; she got her A plus, or whatever that is, 100%, and I couldn’t be more proud.

Winston Benjamin 38:01
Wednesday is still Wed-nes-day in order for me to spell it, okay?

Oren Farchi 38:07
This is how I learned it. Wed-nes-day.

Rena Clark 38:10
Library is libe-rare-y.

Winston Benjamin 38:10
Exactly. [Laughter] We totally understand.

Dr. Hope Blecher 38:16
And learning can be fun! And that’s how you remember it, and it stays with you.

Oren Farchi 38:23
And I would say another perspective that, again, we’re thinking about a lot, I’ve been telling a little bit about our roadmap, but we’d have one more gamified experience in ReadM, in which readers can read with their classmates, wherever they are, at the same time, the same book, and they can see each other’s progress on their screen. So that’s another gamified component that we do have, and according to feedback that we have from some schools that are working with them at the moment, they buy avatars, they play around with those components, and most of them are having fun.

Rena Clark 39:11
I love that. So, I think that takes us into our next segment, our one thing.

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 39:19
It’s time for that one thing.

Rena Clark 39:31
So, for Paul and Winston, and then, Hope and Oren, you can join in. But what’s kind of our big takeaway, the one thing that we’re still either left thinking or that we’re still pondering?

Winston Benjamin 39:43
So I’m going to jump in. Parents want to help. Like, I don’t know if you’ve remembered, Oren was worried about how to pronounce words with his children, so sending something home and saying, “Do this,” and then you’re not getting in contact with parents. It’s not that they don’t want to do a part of it, or be a part of it; they might not really know how to do what we’re asking. So to take a step back and realize that our families who are coming with our children are also immigrant learners trying to figure out the world that we’re walking in as Americans. So to recognize that they’re also struggling is a very important lesson, and I hope I can remember that as I move forward.

Paul Beckermann 40:25
Yeah, and for me, I’m just struck by the genuine problem-solving that happened between both you, Oren, and you, Dr. Hope. How you saw a real prob—or challenge, I guess I should say, and you took your own skills, and you applied it to that situation to improve it, and you continue to do it. I love that you’ve added the creation element to ReadM. I’m all about creation. Student, anything creative is is at the top of my list, and that’s going to inspire a certain group of kids who might not otherwise want to engage in reading. So it’s really cool.

Dr. Hope Blecher 41:01
And for me, I like it because it didn’t blame the child. Like, when you’re saying about immigrant families and helping people, it’s not the child’s fault. It’s not, let’s not, like, “what’s the matter with you?” Which was kind of what was happening with Oren’s children. You know, when they were in a larger group, they would shut down. They didn’t use this word at the time, but they were feeling intimidated and inferior, and he had a way to figure it out. And, you know that not everybody is a software engineer, but the fact that he was like, I’m not gonna let my family or my children feel inferior. There was definitely a frustration on his part, but it was, we’re not going to let this bring us down; there has to be a way that we can rise to the occasion and succeed. And I think that’s a big boost, you know, to say, “It is not your fault. I’m not blaming you for this.”

Winston Benjamin 42:00
Mm, absolutely.

Rena Clark 42:02
I appreciate that. I actually had the privilege this last week to have a panel of students, they were high schoolers, and they were coming back to the elementary school, and all of them were what we call multilanguage learners, and they came in speaking no English. But they talked about their experience as elementary students, and every single one of them talked about the comfort level and where they really did the most learning was in small peer groups, or at recess, or in small groups. But it came down to, kind of my one thing is, the one doing the talking is doing the learning. So it kind of, as you said, I can listen and listen and listen, but until that whole body . . . and I practice, but I need to feel safe, comfortable in a place that’s going to support me in doing that. So it’s just interesting, and even coming out of the mouths of these high schoolers talking about that experience as well. So I think that’s great.

Paul Beckermann 43:01
And it stuck with them. Stuck with them all those years, right? I mean, it’s an indelible experience for them.

Oren Farchi 43:08
Interesting that you brought that up. We do have one school, actually a teacher with certain ESL students, which are high schoolers and they’re immigrants. And it was fun to see her feedback that these high schoolers are using ReadM, although it is, visually, it is for kids K to fourth, but seeing high schoolers using that, that was something really . . . heartwarming? Is that the right word?

Rena Clark 43:48
Mhm. The ripple effect of your idea. Yeah.

Oren Farchi 43:52
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Beckermann 43:55
Do you have any final words to add, Oren, before we sign off here today?

Oren Farchi 44:00
Yes. One word, summer slide. Don’t let the summer slide come. We do have the tool for you. Advertisement. No, I’m kidding, yeah. Don’t let the summer slide come in; just prevent that. We have the tool for you. Use it.

Winston Benjamin 44:20
Oren, I really appreciate you, like every time you’re talking, I hear and see my own dad telling me that education matters. And I’m so, so happy that you, like him, found a way to connect what mattered to the world, to your child. One of the things that it just reminded me, even though I was an American English speaker, learning how not to say “surfer ticket” instead of “certificate” was a thing. My teachers thought that I was special needs because I spelled “color” with a “u.” So I think the biggest part about this is that you are not blaming the student. You’re providing an opportunity for them to demonstrate their abilities. I hated talking in school because I had an accent and I was made fun of. So again, I think this is such an important part of providing an opportunity for students as they grow to find self-worth and value in themselves. So I really appreciate you doing this work. To all the listeners, ReadM. Let’s talk. Let’s get it out there. Let’s get them all, let’s get ’em reading. Thank you.

Dr. Hope Blecher 45:25
Thank you.

Oren Farchi 45:26
Thank you so much.

Rena Clark 45:30
Thanks for listening to Unpacking Education.

Winston Benjamin 45:33
We invite you to visit us at avidopenaccess.org, where you can discover resources to support student agency, equity, and academic tenacity to create a classroom for future-ready learners.

Paul Beckermann 45:48
We’ll be back here next Wednesday for a fresh episode of Unpacking Education.

Rena Clark 45:52
And remember, go forth and be awesome.

Winston Benjamin 45:56
Thank you for all you do.

Paul Beckermann 45:57
You make a difference.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai