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"Second-grade students who read aloud to dogs in an after-school program demonstrated improved attitudes about reading, according to researchers at Tufts Institute for Human-Animal Interaction at Tufts University. Their research appears online in advance of print in the Early Childhood Education Journal. Reading skills are often associated with improved academic performance and positive attitudes about school in children. Researchers wanted to learn if animal-assisted intervention in the form of reading aloud to dogs in a classroom setting could contribute to improved skills and attitudes."

"You are more likely to remember something if you read it out loud, a study from the University of Waterloo has found. A recent Waterloo study found that speaking text aloud helps to get words into long-term memory. Dubbed the "production effect," the study determined that it is the dual action of speaking and hearing oneself that has the most beneficial impact on memory."

Free download software reads web pages aloud. Also reads pdf and word files. 

"http://bit.ly/wrad"

Ivan the Gorilla has died at the age of 50 in Zoo Atlanta. We are reading The One and Only Ivan for the Global Read Aloud this year.

Visit any school affiliated with the TCRWP and you'll immediately see why the organization is a success. Pull your chair alongside and listen to the children's memoirs and essays, lean-in and listen to their literature circles and read aloud conversations and you'll glimpse why this work has captured the hearts and minds of thousands of educators the world over.

You can build just about any app you can imagine with App Inventor. Often people begin by building games like WhackAMole or games that let you draw funny pictures on your friend's faces. You can even make use of the phone's sensors to move a ball through a maze based on tilting the phone. But app building is not limited to simple games. You can also build apps that inform and educate. You can create a quiz app to help you and your classmates study for a test. With Android's text-to-speech capabilities, you can even have the phone ask the questions aloud. To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app's behavior.

WOW! Very Scratch-like UI for programming Android mobile apps!!

Wonderful video clips where students can record and practice their speaking. Good for improving literacy as well as English speaking skills. Any student who does not like reading aloud would enjoy! Latest: a clip from Despicable Me!

"No film set of a 1950's primary school classroom would be complete without the serried ranks of neatly dressed children chanting times tables aloud at their wooden desks. Since those days, learning through repetition has fallen in and out of vogue. That's why it's so interesting to witness the recent resurgence in support for rote learning, backed by high-profile figures from the world of politics and education alike."

"Storytime: While reading to children has many benefits, simply speaking the words aloud may not be enough to improve cognitive development in preschoolers. A new international study, published in the journal PLOS ONE and led by researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, shows that engaging with children while reading books to them gives their brain a cognitive "boost.""

More and more schools, colleges and universities are using online educational tools that students are required to use to obtain course syllabi, access lectures and associated material, participate in class discussions, read course material, and receive grades and feedback from instructors. These popular tools, such as Blackboard, can frequently pose significant barriers to students with vision loss because they do not work well, if at all, with computer programs commonly used by students who are blind or visually impaired to access content displayed on the computer screen. For example, screen reading software reads the contents of the screen aloud. Screen magnification software enlarges text and graphics displayed on the computer screen in a customized way.

We all get overloaded from time to time, especially toward the end of a term when your todo list turns from being measured by points to metres. We all have our own capacity to deal with the issues at hand, and the ideas behind Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) attempt to maximise our bandwidth while streamlining the signals. The origins of the theory go back to the 1980s when a plethora of digital innovations changed how presentations were done in the business world. This trickled down in the following decades into how teachers presented ideas, moving away from blackboard and Over-Head Projectors to digitalised PowerPoint presentations. As with any new innovation, form overcame function, and for a period in the early noughties, I swear it must have been the law to cram as many animations and sound effects into every PowerPoint, and reading every word from the screen aloud was mandatory.

A collection of stories read by actors - could be used as a reading center, an alternative to read alouds, or a home alternative for students.

A website made in conjunction with the Screen Actors Guild thaf has famous actors reading a range of picture story books with accompanying pictures from the book. Includes activities to do in class as well.  Needs Flash but you can just go to the YouTube channel to access the stories themselves. http://www.youtube.com/StorylineOnline

Storyline is a website that brings stories to life, it helps that each one is told by a great storyteller.