Sorry I haven’t been spending much time here lately–I’ve been pretty busy.
The demo is here: http://watchknowreader.busedge.com/
And I have a call for volunteers, to help with it, here:
http://larrysanger.org/2011/07/see-a-readingbear-demo-volunteer-to-help-finish/
Aw, come on–is it really that bad?
Click on “Short A” and choose the first presentation type. Be sure to check out the options.
It will be 100% free. It is also 100% non-profit.
And I do need help finishing it!
It’s looks great! I had a chance to run through most of the short a show. My older kids started distracting the little one so we could not finish. But before that happened he was enjoying it very much!
Hi Dad Dude,
I abandoned it because it took more time than I had to download…I have an old, and FULL computer 
Short A got “stuck” on “4 out of 7”. (“6 out of 7” short E). I’ll try again later.
I can tell you that I really like the menu options. That is a great feature!
Looking forward to seeing it!
I can’t get the reader to work at all. I am not sure if it is a Chrome thing, I will try it on IE later.
I did most of the short I pictures last night until I fell asleep. Will work on more tonight when kiddo is in bed.
This is such a brilliant work. This is what I was expecting for my son after LR. I really liked the sentences and the appropriate demonstrations. My son also enjoyed the presentation thoroughly.
I agree with others that it was a bit slow to progress but overall a very perfect job. I wish I could volunteer but I am going back to work soon 
Wow, that’s awesome.
It loaded fairly quickly for me.
I sat and did the short a video through “ham” with my 18 month old just now. She even attempted to say some of the words.
I really love love this project. Thank you for working so hard at it. When life settles down a bit, I’ll try to volunteer to help.
Bummer. Am I missing something. My computer will only load to either 4 or to 6 files and just stop and sit right there. I didn’t think my laptop was that slow.
Thanks, everyone, for testing it! Thanks also for your kind words!
It hasn’t been widely tested until very recently. I had trouble loading it from a friend’s slow internet connection, and after that, the programmer has focused 100% on certain improvements to the cacheing, which should make it go with fewer hang-ups. My guess is that you have to have a fast connection, and possibly a fast computer, to load it. Exactly what to do about this situation, I’m not sure. Probably we’ll create a lower-quality version for slower computers, with much smaller/lower-res videos and pix.
If you want to help more with testing, I’d really appreciate it. The following would help a lot:
IF you are having trouble loading it, can you:
(1) Note the exact time when it starts loading the first “cluster” (of 7 slides).
(2) Time the exact time when it starts playing the first slide. This will allow us to tell exactly how long it takes you to load. If it takes over a minute, well, let us know that.
(3) If you know what your Internet speed is, please give us as much info on that as you can. (Fast DSL, 1 GB/second or whatever. Or, if you feel inspired to visit http://www.speedtest.net/ and tell me the results, that would be great.)
(4) What system (version of Windows, Mac, Linux) and browser are you using?
(5) Tell me your processor speed (on Windows computers, right-click the “Computer” icon and look under “System” for “Processor”). I doubt processor speed will make much difference, but it wouldn’t hurt to know.
Note, the server this demo is hosted on is not the speediest. The server where the live version is hosted should be considerably faster.
Email the results to me at sanger@watchknow.org – and thanks in advance!
Well done, Larry!
I love how you’ve implemented the splitting up of the phonemes. It’s funny though that this is actually pretty close to how we originally intended LR’s Split Mode feature to be for v2 (including exactly how the voices should be recorded and marked). The full implementation of it (which would involve our Easy Voice Recorder software also) involved too much programming, so we decided to delay it until the next major upgrade (v3). Glad to see you also think this is a good way to implement it!
Best of luck with this project!
Thanks, KL!
The software for mapping audio to text is was the biggest single component yet, and specific time markers are suggested by the system but they are inexact–so inputting the time markers turns out to be quite labor-intensive. Not nearly as hard as it was a few months ago, though. Ironing out the kinks with this is one main reason why we’re not further along with the content. The system is mature enough now that I can fix the time markers for a sentence (matching audio to text precisely) in a few minutes. Formerly it would take a half hour or hour. Of course, it could be done automatically, but that would be a seriously huge programming project. Some day, though, someone will do it and then we’ll see the birth of a new product: audio enhanced e-books with precisely matched karaoke text. I don’t know, but I’m guessing such a thing would be excellent for beginning readers.
Thanks for letting me talk about it here on BrillKids Forum.
By the way, baby E. greatly enjoys his Little Reader lessons.
No problem. The aim of this Forum is to promote early learning, and everyone who can help towards that is welcomed here (so long as it doesn’t become just blatant advertizing). We try our best to stay product-neutral.
I certainly know what you mean about the audio part being the most time and labor intensive. That’s why we decided to postpone it in LR and just go with the current (much simpler) Split Mode. Funny you should also mention the Karaoke feature. That was originally also meant to have been in the upcoming LMs (Little Musician) release, but it’s also being postponed for the next build.
The enhanced split mode for LR and the Karaoke feature of LMs is where LR and LMs will come together. We’ll start to work on these features towards the end of this year once a couple of other projects are finished.
Yes, way to go! Actually it worked on my Google Chrome browser. The slowness had to do with the browser I was using.
We do most testing on Chrome (which I use) and Firefox (which the programmers use). So, browser-wise, those would be the safest. It should work fine in IE, though…
Yes, for some reason it didn’t work on Internet Explorer for me. It would load only so far and then stop and just sit and sit and sit. So I switched to my Chrome browser and it worked just fine.
My computer can be a little testy at times. I’m sure it needs a good cleaning out since I’m not the only person in my house that uses it.
I’m looking forward to the whole program. I think this will definitely be helpful with teaching phonics skills when we switch over to that this fall.
Some people weren’t able to view the Reading Bear demo site (http://watchknowreader.busedge.com/) because there was a recent bug in the program that made it not show up in Internet Explorer. That’s been fixed, so you folks should be able to see it.
Also, the program has been sped up (actually, what’s been sped up is the pre-loading), and if you get to a slide that is taking a long time to load, you can either enjoy watching the progress of it loading, or simply arrow past it. We’re now going to work on a low-quality version for people with low bandwidth.
Thanks for everyone’s help–you did help!
But…we still need volunteers to finish it. Read more here: http://larrysanger.org/2011/07/see-a-readingbear-demo-volunteer-to-help-finish/
Yay! Thanks for the sample! I really like that you can read a sentence with each word. I’m excited for the children who will benefit from this!
I still can’t load it on chrome. I have road runner and these are the speeds that the speedtest.net gave me. I figure that is what the issue is and I don’t have option to fix it.
If that speedtest.net result is credible, that sure would explain it. But it’s practically incredible. If you were going that slow, I have to wonder if you’d be able to use BrillKids.com, or the live.com tools (thanks for helping!!!)…and Road Runner, well, it isn’t that slow. Try doing the test again…
Is the demo site loading at all on Chrome? Do you see anything when you get to the website? If so, how about when you click “Short A”, and if you get that far, when you click “Sound It Out Slowly”?