Using the reader pen as a word learning aid
Typically, a teacher might try to figure out what kind of words students have difficulty with, and they then get a list of words to practise. But a modern reader pen can track which terms are scanned the most and automatically create a tailor-made glossary with the most common words.
Finding what words are challenging
For a student with reading problems, some words are often more challenging than others to decode or understand. Identifying these words usually involves a second party who listens and prepares a particular wordlist so the student can practise them. A modern reader pen can now determine which terms the student actively chooses to listen to a little extra or look up.
The aim is to shorten the loop, to avoid going through a teacher or parent who has to figure out what the student has difficulty with. It makes the students more independent, as they can start practising the words themselves and are exposed to terms relevant to their context.
Making a glossary
When students read different books and texts, they use the reader pen to scan words that they find difficult. The pen keeps track of which terms are scanned, listened to and looked up in the dictionary most often. These statistics are then used to create a glossary which can be used for practice in a gamified way, where the different words are shown in random order.
Words that the students have been more active on in their reading show up more often, because it can be assumed that these words have been the most problematic. The context is therefore which words the person has worked with and which ones they have listened to or looked up a little extra. The reader pen then carries those words over in a small training round.
Practising the words
If you enter practice mode and select “last week’s word”, the pen will randomly present words to you, allowing you to listen and look up definitions and thus practise them. You’ll get a new randomly selected word when you move on to the next one. Since the statistics are based on which terms you scan frequently, the ones you’ve learned will disappear over time and be replaced by new words that have been challenging. Once you learn to recognise a word and what it sounds like and means, you will no longer need to scan it. As you use the pen, it accumulates new content that becomes the basis for your training.
The reader pen can also be used for daily repetitions. If you have read a book or a text and scanned different words, in the evening you can take out the pen, choose “word of the day”, and practise the words you had problems with during the day. If you do the same the next day, you get to practise the words you had issues with that day. The idea is that students will gradually learn to understand and interpret more and more words themselves, because the reader pen keeps track of which words they have the most trouble with.
