While working on the assignments in this class I began to think about how storytelling must be for students who have different abilities than the average student. I thought about this because as a child I was not a big reader and never truly enjoyed reading. I really enjoyed being read to by adults and I would even follow along in the books as they read, but when told to read on my own I always had an aversion to it. This went past elementary school and well into middle school. I actually read my first full book by myself in seventh grade, Stuart Little. My mom always noticed that while reading I would add words that weren’t written or miss words that were written on the pages. Because of this as I got older and started my teacher cadet classes I noticed when reading books or telling stories my flow was always interrupted because I wasn’t properly reading what was on the pages. It was like I was having to decipher what was written as I was reading it and have to say it aloud to a classroom for students. even though I struggled with this I always brushed it off and thought that it wasn’t a big deal. Little did I know that they would follow me into my education career and give me trouble even into undergrad and graduate school.
When beginning my college career I was faced with a lot of academic reading. I was not familiar with this in the struggles that I had in elementary and middle school came back to the surface. Because academic texts are so dense and don’t have many breaks all the words seem to run together and it was nearly impossible for me to get through it. I think this is mainly due to me having ADHD and not knowing how to time the flow of reading my sentences. I had to break these paragraphs in sentences down into smaller bits that I could digest. It wasn’t until about a year ago I discovered the ad on beeline which would drastically change the way that I read and understood both academic text and text just read for enjoyment. I would like to share this discovery with you all and see if you can help students today before they get to college and don’t know how to make adjustments.
There are different fonts that allow students to understand what they are reading better and not to get lost in the words and sentences on the page. Sometimes documents are already written like this but in the case that they aren’t there is some assistive technology that can help with that. I recently discovered a chrome extension that can be added to laptops and/or ChromeBooks to help with this. BeeLine Reader is a Chrome extension that can be added to a web browser to help break up text-dense sites. This technology adds color to sentences to help guide you as you read making it easier to comprehend what is being said.
Here is an example of what that looks like from BeeLine.
This type of technology can be extremely helpful for neurodivergent people, especially those that struggle with ADHD. I can personally say that this technology has been extremely helpful for me. BeeLine is a subscription-based tech tool. They offer several plans based on what is needed.
"Browser plugin(Chrome/Firefox/Brave): $2/month for one browser or $4.50/month for 5 browsers. You can subscribe annually to get discounted pricing.
PDF plugin(Chrome/Brave): $5/month for up to 4 browsers. You can subscribe annually to get one month free.
iOS app: Our award-winningiOS applets you save news articles and other web content to your personal reading list, where you can read it with our patented technology and other text formatting options ($4.99). There is an additional in-app purchase for viewing text-based PDFs ($9.99). But you can also use BeeLine on iOS for free, with ouriOS extension for Safari. iOS purchases sync across all of your iOS devices, and all purchases are one-time, not subscription."
Although they list these prices, it appears that you can still access their technology for a limited amount of times daily based on the message that I got after downloading the extension.
Additionally, when you apply BeeLine to a webpage you are given some settings to choose from. This unlocks another assistive technology tool, Dyslexic Font. This font adds weight to the bottom of each letter making them more discernable to someone with Dyslexia.
This resource could be extremely helpful to so many people. I can absolutely see a difference in my reading habits and how much information I retain while reading.
Storytelling to me is much more than just a teacher reading a story to a student. I think storytelling is also the way that students tell stories to themselves by reading books and telling those stories to their classmates and families after reading. I feel as though we are sometimes leaving students out who don’t have the same abilities as others. With add-ons like beeline and other assistive technology we have the perfect opportunity to help the students and level out the playing field. This is something that I am very passionate about and I never want to leave students behind in the classroom or library. Part of our jobs as library professionals is to assist teachers in reaching their students this is just one way that we can work with teachers and students to close gaps. This technology that helps students understand what they are reading helps with the overall success of storytelling. I would love to see books written in these kind of fonts that could help students better. I haven’t been able to find any books like this yet, for right now the majority of what I find online. I think in today’s age there is a market for these books and they could be seamlessly integrated into classrooms. It would be no different than books that are published in large print and/or in different languages.
Take Beeline’s online challenge to see how this technology works and how effective it is.
Reading list: Myths
Gods and Heroes: Mythology Around the World
Feathered Serpent and the Five Suns: A Mesoamerican Creation Myth
Young Zeus
Pegasus
Ganesha’s Sweet Tooth
Mount Olympus Basketball
Elephant Prince: The Story of Ganesh
References
Lum, N. (2023). BeeLine Reader: making reading on-screen easier and faster. Retrieved 26 February 2023, from https://www.beelinereader.com/
What a great topic for your free choice! While I was familiar with the OpenDyslexia font, I had never heard of BeeLine before your post. The color gradient test absolutely did keep my focus on the words better. I wonder if there's a way to get this technology for schools? Because it might just be a minor tweak or expense that could radically alter a person's relationship to reading online. My dad is dyslexic, and he absolutely loves reading, but he has always had a hard time with focus since reading was difficult for him; I remember how he felt when he discovered audiobooks, and how listening and reading along helped him be able to process the text at a much faster, focused rate than reading it independently. I'd love to see this type of technology exist outside of only the online sphere - print books deserve accessibility options too. Thanks for sharing!
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Hi Destiny,
ReplyDeleteWhat a great topic for your free choice! While I was familiar with the OpenDyslexia font, I had never heard of BeeLine before your post. The color gradient test absolutely did keep my focus on the words better. I wonder if there's a way to get this technology for schools? Because it might just be a minor tweak or expense that could radically alter a person's relationship to reading online. My dad is dyslexic, and he absolutely loves reading, but he has always had a hard time with focus since reading was difficult for him; I remember how he felt when he discovered audiobooks, and how listening and reading along helped him be able to process the text at a much faster, focused rate than reading it independently. I'd love to see this type of technology exist outside of only the online sphere - print books deserve accessibility options too. Thanks for sharing!