Making / Learning / Work was an adult learning innovation project hosted at the MIT Media Lab from September 2014 to May 2016. This site is an archive of the project documentation.
Read Out Loud is an application that empowers adults who are learning English to turn almost any reading material into an experience to help them learn English.
Learners can take a picture of page of text and the app then scans in the page and presents the learner with a host of additional tools to facilitate reading. They can read the text out loud, which helps learners who are more comfortable with spoken English understand what is being said on the page. They can select words to translate them into their native language. And coming soon, they can save words to a list for review.
By giving adult learners the ability to scan in any page and convert it into learning material, we want to give them more agency to learn from material that focuses on subjects they care about, as well as increase access to English language learning material, as now they can check out any book from the public library and use it as learning material with support in their native language.
The second iteration is now completed and we are testing it in an ESOL classroom.
Some Photos from User Testing - March 2015
We hope to release the app on the Google Play store at the end of May.
Updates Regarding Read Out Loud
Read Out Loud Alpha Released!
We have just released an alpha version of Read Out Loud on the Google Play Store!
Testing Read Out Loud in the Classroom
On March 3rd, Srishti and I went to a ESOL school for adult learners in East Boston, Massachusetts, to get the students’ feedback on the newest iteration of ...
Rough Prototyping Update
Over the past few weeks, we have been working on a new edition of the “storyteller” prototype, which I want to introduce briefly here. Back in September, we ...
Visit to an ESOL class for parents
Last week, I went to sit in on an intermediate ESOL class for parents at a local elementary school in Boston. I wanted to quickly post my findings from the c...
Rough Prototyping
In this post, we will focus on “Storyteller”, one of the ideas we have been working on to prototype how technology can help adult learners with very basic li...