We’re now up to five presentations on the Reading Bear demo site: http://watchknowreader.busedge.com/ Five presentations cover Short A, E, I, O, and U. If you play the full versions, this takes (I estimate) over 90 minutes to get through. And we’ve just started. Actually, the audio & text are matched up reliably only for the first two presentations. We’re still working on the final touches for the Short I, O, and U…which is actually a lot of work. (I guess that means IOU a lot of work! Ha!)
Also, now there are quizzes and a review to explore.
And you can set up an account and track your progress.
If you’re still interested in helping me develop this completely free, non-profit, educational resource, do let me know at sanger@watchknow.org!
I love the presentations, a really good introduction to sounding out words
Will you be breaking them up a bit more? My son would quickly get bored after 2 or 3 words, and it is a shame that you can’t select the words individually in the playback. It would make it easier to use with young children who have limited attention spans and screen time.
I was thinking about breaking them up some more. That’s probably a post-launch feature, which means it might never happen, but we’ll see.
In the meantime, the site saves your place for you. So if you want to do a few words and then continue on from there, you can do that. You can also quickly find a particular word with the progress bar. (Just grab the progress bar and it will display which word & slide you’re on.)
Also bear in mind that you can use the “flashcards” setting too.
That’s a new one to me, i.e., nobody has ever reported such a problem. The sentences should be perfect on A and E…is it all of the sentences for you, or just some? If only some, which? Can you give me more details about the problem you’re seeing?
Also, if you can give me other details like your system & browser, that would help a lot. You can email me at sanger@watchknow.org if you don’t want to give me the data here.
“Verbal” is ambiguous…which comes first, the audio or the text?
The speed of your computer should have nothing to do with it…how about browser & system info? Internet connection speed (though, again, this shouldn’t matter; no file should start playing until they’re all downloaded)?
Answering your earlier question, it’s around 150 words now, but a lot more than that are planned–1200 to 1500.
Nice job. I found a small typo in select presentation type, Audio Flashcards are described as “Shows only words and picturess with audio” The word pictures is spelled wrong with an extra “s”.
I want to spend more time looking at them but I’ve got to start dinner. I’m humbled and very impressed.
I’m using 64 bit and have tested in Firefox, and can’t replicate the problem. A few days after you reported this bug the first time, I encountered a somewhat similar problem (might have been the same as yours). Well, we thought we fixed that problem (I’m not seeing it anymore).
Disappointed that it’s not fixed for you. Is this for all the presentations, or just the ones after short a and short e? The short a and short e presentations are the only ones that have timing data that is 100% edited. If you looked at any other presentation, you might think that the timing is way off–but that’s a data problem, not a software problem, and will be edited before launch.
There’s one other thing that you might need to do: clear your cache. In Firefox, it’s the Firefox button (upper left) > History > Clear Recent History > Time Range to Clear: Everything and make sure Cache is checked, then press Clear Now. After you do this, close Firefox and reopen to the testing site, and tell me if you still see the problem for “short a” and “short e”.
First, did you know that you can click the “Always show video of word spoken” box in Settings (when playing the presentation, it’s the gear button, in upper right)? Then try doing full screen (F11 in most browsers, I believe) and then view the presentation at 150% (click on the largest A). Your babies can actually watch a video of an excellent English speaker, our professional voiceover artist Melissa Moats, forming the sounds as well as saying the word at normal speed.
Anyway, the new addition to Reading Bear is the “low bandwidth version” for all presentations. Those of you who have very slow Internet connections should be able to view that. It’s still very watchable, give it a try!
We also have a new logo…not yet to be unveiled, although you could peek at a version of it on 99designs.com.
Presentations (with quizzes & reviews on these) now go up to #7, although the timing data is edited only for “short a” and “short e,” and also mostly on “short i”. The quiz feature is very cool, and I’ve never seen a free online feature quite like it. Of course, I wouldn’t recommend it for very little ones. H., age 5, loves the quiz feature, although it’s now easy peasy for him.
Since my programmers had a few extra cycles as the programming side of the project came to a close, I had them break down presentations into 5-word chunks. If you go to http://watchknowreader.busedge.com/ and look below the presentation titles (there are now 9 presentations), you’ll see letters: a, b, c, etc. Those represent small (baby-sized!) chunks of the much longer presentations. If you make an account and log in, then there will be numbers in parentheses after those letters. Every time you click on one of the letters, the counter for just that part will go up. This way you can keep track of how many times you’ve viewed (or at least, clicked on) a part of a presentation. I hope that works for you!
Also, for those of you with slow connections, the “low quality” version of the presentations now work well. In fact, the whole thing should be pretty much bug-free (patreiche’s bug, which we tried to but can’t replicate, notwithstanding).
I just wanted to thank you for this great reading tool. I showed it to my baby who has just turned 1 and he LOVED it. He was even asking for more till something funny happened: he said the word “pat” with no prior listening to the pronunciation. I could not believe it first but he kept repeating it… I am wondering if babies can intuit phonics with Reading Bear. If they do, then it would be really amazing!
I am wondering if it can be translated to other languages. I would volunteer for Arabic. Reading Bear would work perfectly as the language is “very phonic”.
Do you mind telling me how you’ve been using it? For example, how often, how long your sessions go, which presentation type you use (Sound It Out For Me, or another one), whether you show the video of the word spoken, etc.
Just very curious how people are using it!
Re: translating to other languages, maybe indeed, but first let me get the American English Reading Bear going! After that, I imagine the Brits will be demanding a British English edition…
I started with the audio only, just to give it a try, that<s when my baby said “pat”. Now, I am using the sound it slowly everyday we have English, i.e: 3 times a week, usually right after LR.
So now I am using it on a regular basis and wish I could use it for the other languages too (for those, I use downloads from LR library)
Thanks again for all your effort and great sense of pedagogy.
