Education India Project #593

Literacy for a Billion in India!

by PlanetRead

Project Report | Feb 21, 2017
Update: AniBooks for Early Grade Reading

By Carolyn Lengel | volunteer

"Turtle's Flute"

We're delighted to announce that we've completed our third milestone in the "AniBooks for Early Grade Reading" project supported by USAID and READAlliance. Things are happening very quickly!

AniBooks are animated, digitally delivered stories that use PlanetRead founder Brij Kothari's innovation, Same-Language Subtitling (SLS), to help children make advances in reading and critical thinking. The reason AniBooks appeal to students is no surprise: children everywhere like to watch cartoons! And with the addition of SLS, these cartoons are educational, too. Children watch the subtitles and get inescapable, automatic reading practice that helps them become truly literate.

The main goal of the "AniBooks for Early Grade Reading" project is to integrate AniBooks into the schools and lives of children in Grades 1-4 (roughly ages 6-10) to support the development of reading skills. The project targets select schools in the priority Hindi states (Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh), in partnership with organisations that have the experience and infrastructure to distribute and deploy digital content on existing screens in schools and homes.

Where are we so far on this project?

We've created 20 Hindi-language AniBooks. Among the animated stories newly translated to Hindi are "The Elephant King" ("Haathi Raja"), "The Red Raincoat" ("Laal Barsaati"), and "Topsy Turvy" ("Ulat Palat").
We've met with reading specialists and educators to determine the types of activities that would be most helpful as accompaniments to the AniBooks, and we've created educational activities in Hindi for the first 10 of our 20 Hindi AniBooks. The activities focus on letters and sounds (for students in lower grades), vocabulary, comprehension, grammar, and problem-solving.
We've signed agreements with four distribution partners who have the experience and infrastructure to help us distribute AniBooks to children in the priority Hindi states.

We're very excited to get this project underway! We recently did field testing with grades 1-2 at a rural government school to get a sense of the level of understanding among children who have few reading resources available. Learning through association, connecting concepts and ideas, and inferring information are meaningful skills, and children in such schools sometimes have little experience with them. Our lessons were based on the AniBook "Turtle's Flute" in Tamil, and in the first session, we asked the children to draw pictures showing some things they expect from the story.

We've also been testing our newly developed Hindi activities with children who are students of Hindi as a second language and have basic knowledge of reading and writing in Hindi. They watched three stories—"The Greatest Treasure," "The Whispering Palms," and "Too Many Bananas"—and did activities on paper.

These field tests help us understand what children of various backgrounds and educational levels need from the stories and activities we're developing. Stay tuned for more about our findings in future updates from PlanetRead!

We are very excited at the strides we're making toward getting AniBooks in classrooms in India. And, as always, your support helps us immeasurably! Our inexpensive, cost-effective literacy programs make the most of your contributions, and we would be very grateful if you would consider making a donation today.

Field test with children at government school

Activity field tester Joanna

A completed activity from one of our field testers

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Nov 25, 2016
PlanetRead Founder Speaks at TEDxCERN

By Carolyn Lengel | Volunteer

Brij Kothari in action at TEDxCERN

Dear friends and supporters of literacy for all,

In India, 740 million people can’t read well enough to get the information they need from a newspaper. They can’t read well enough to manage a bus schedule, fill out a form, or make sure that a prescription is accurately filled. For them, illiteracy is not a theoretical struggle—it’s a daily disadvantage.

That population is equal to 100 times the number of people living in Switzerland. Why the comparison to Switzerland? Because Switzerland has been the setting for some of Bollywood’s biggest hit songs—and because Switzerland is the home of CERN, which on November 5 hosted the “Ripples of Curiosity” TEDx event. One of the innovative thinkers speaking at TEDxCERN was PlanetRead’s founder, Brij Kothari, who came up with the idea of using same-language subtitles for hugely popular Bollywood songs on Indian television as a way to bring some of those 740 million weak-literate or illiterate people in India into the light of literacy.

In his TEDxCERN talk, now available online, Brij shows examples from eye-tracking studies that demonstrate how same-language subtitles bring weak readers into inescapable engagement with written words. He cites inspiring examples of people who have gone from being unable to read beyond a few letters to being able to read well enough to manage modern life.

Brij notes that world leaders have supported his simple, innovative idea, quoting Bill Clinton’s praise of same-language subtitling (SLS) as “a small change that has a staggering impact on people’s lives.”

In pointing out that wiping out illiteracy is “simply a matter of a million people singing” along with subtitled songs from their favorite films, Brij also explains how inexpensive his solution is. “One dollar gives a lifetime of reading to a person.... To scale up nationally would cost a million dollars a year, and in five years we would transition 500 million weak readers” to literacy sufficient to read a newspaper.

Watch Brij’s TEDx talk—it’s well worth ten minutes of your time. And we hope you’ll agree with the TEDxCERN audience that increasing the reach of same-language subtitling for literacy is an effort worthy of your support!

Links:

Brij Kothari's TEDx talk on same-language subtitling

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Aug 26, 2016
News: Early Grade Reading Innovation Challenge

By Carolyn Lengel | volunteer

Village kids engaged with digital story

Dear friends and supporters of same-language subtitles for literacy,

Imagine looking for children’s books in an Indian village and not finding a single one. In rural India, it's all too common for children to have nothing at all to read. But since over 700 million Indians watch television and there are nearly 200 million smartphone users, no books no longer has to mean no opportunities for reading.

For 20 years, PlanetRead has been using the idea of same-language subtitles (SLS) on television for mass literacy, and if you've followed our work, you know that our research demonstrates that this regular, inescapable reading practice is helping people of all ages become better readers.

A few weeks ago, we learned that PlanetRead had won the Early Grade Reading Innovation Challenge (EGRIC) from READ Alliance and USAID. With their support and yours, we are expanding our SLS work to integrate AniBooks--animated digital stories with SLS--into the schools and lives of Hindi-speaking children in Grades 1-3, or ages 6-10.

Our sister company BookBox has been creating AniBooks to teach reading and language learning to children for some time, and we are in the process of identifying Hindi stories that will provide maximum benefit to the children in this program. We aim to deploy our content using Pico and other low-cost, low-energy projectors; computers already in the children's schools; mobile phones and smartphones, when those are available; and televisions already in homes in rural areas. As the program ramps up, we will be tracking the kids' reading progress through an app which will be accessible on mobile phones and tablets.

We are extremely excited about this new plan to leverage our SLS and technology experience to help children who are just beginning their education. READ Alliance and USAID are helping us bring the dream of full literacy for everyone in India a step closer to reality, and we are grateful to them and to you for continuing support!

Links:

READ Alliance report on EGRIC winners

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