The ability to convey messages through sounds is known as language skills, with listening skills being one of its most essential components. Listening skills are developed by children before they can speak, read, and write. However, these skills are often neglected, which affects other language skills. To improve students' listening skills, it's…

The author, a fifth-grade teacher, describes how she reimagined the literary essay curriculum to amplify student identity, agency, and voice by creating a class podcast. Because of their similar structure and organization, teaching students literary analysis and interpretation through podcast writing offered entry into literary essays. The author…

Many students entering middle school experience increased difficulty in acquiring academic content vocabulary, especially in science. Content Acquisition Podcasts for Students (CAP-S) were developed over a decade ago to help remediate this issue and provide structured multimedia instruction on academic content vocabulary to help improve the…

Whether SMS-based nudge interventions can increase parent engagement and improve child learning outcomes across diverse contexts such as rural West Africa is unknown. We conducted a school-randomized trial to test the impacts of an audio or text-message intervention (two messages per week for one school year) to parents and teachers of second and…

The paper presents an application for interactive sonification of images intended for use on mobile devices in education of blind children at elementary school level. The paper proposes novel sonification algorithms for converting colour and grayscale images into sound. The blind user can interactively explore image content through multi-touch…

This report outlines findings from the National Literacy Trust's tenth Annual Literacy Survey relating to children and young people's reading in 2020, in addition to findings from the Trust's survey of children and young people's reading during the COVID-19 lockdown. 58,346 children and young people aged 9 to 18 in the UK took part in the Annual…

The present small-scale study investigates language learning in primary schools in Luxembourg and the ways in which this process is mediated by peers and the iPad app iTEO. This study draws its data from the larger longitudinal qualitative research project iTEO (2013-2017) and is based on 13 hours of audio and video-recordings. The participants…

This study investigates the differential effects of the iPad on first and second language learning by Saudi children in the home environment. The subjects consisted of 78 parents and 118 children. The children were grouped into: 1-6 years old (young children in kindergarten and pre-school); 7- 9 years (grades 1-3); and 10-12 years (grades 4-6).…

Informed by sociocultural and systems theory tenets, this study used ethnographic research methods to examine the feasibility of using speech recognition (SR) technology to support struggling readers in an early elementary classroom setting. Observations of eight first graders were conducted as they participated in a structured SR-supported…

Since their introduction in 2010, much has been said and written about Apple's iPad (Apple Inc., Cupertino, CA, USA) and its potential to transform when and how students learn. Much of this hype has focused on attributes of the device such as its touch screen interface, light and portable form factor, easy-to-use operating system, and large…

This study attempts to document the efficacy of peer-support and self-monitoring during partnered reading by third grade students as evidenced by their discourse. Pairs of third grade students engaged in partnered reading in a general education third grade classroom. Their oral reading, coaching and conversations were recorded using i-Pod2s over…

This exploratory study investigates the potential of a tablet-based note-taking application (TbNA) to serve as a digital notebook in support of students' classroom science practices. An elementary teacher (Grades 4-5) from a public charter school integrated a TbNA into her science class for one semester while participating in professional…

Twitter, Google Docs and their cousins shrink the spaces between cultures even as they expand the reach of a typical classroom. How can a teacher use them to promote social justice? In Sarah Brown Wessling's English class, students are about to give Little Red Riding Hood a makeover. For weeks, her students at Johnston High School in Johnston,…