Freddie: Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Brooklyn Cafe midday show. We are coming. Countdown to Christmas, Hanukkah and the New Year.
Dawn: Are you ready to get into this? Let's start with I want to start with Ted Hodkinson and Ken Holmer. I spoke to Ted and I said, come on in. He brought Ken Horner. Ted is the founder of Roots and Wings, and they teach kids to read. Simple, but yet not so simple. But they do an incredible job in our community, working with our elementary schools, third grade and up, getting our kids on grade level and beyond to read. So welcome, Ted, and welcome, Ken.
Ted: Well, thank you so much. Thank you.
Dawn: It's such a pleasure to have you. Ted, do you want to introduce Ken? Can you tell me he's the man of the hour?
Ted: Well, he is the man of the hour, because, as you probably remember, we just keep trying to expand our program to more schools to help kids read. And we're always looking for innovative new ways to accomplish that. And so I met Ken about, well, last summer. And he said, I've heard some good things about your program. That always excites me because it means somebody else is actually talking about us besides me. So I met him for lunch and he wanted to know all about it. And he said, you know, your program is so unique because you've involved the schools and you're in the schools and you're helping the kids and you're hiring the teachers. And then he said, we have this AI program that we're working on to help kids read where they get to read, and we hear and understand what they're reading, and we can do this, and we can, we can. We're like your program of iReady, but we're like on steroids because the teacher can be listening to all the kids individually and understand what their problems are. And now I'm going to let him take over because he knows his program so much better. But we've instituted it in a couple of schools. They're having great results, and the goal is to help kids read.
Dawn: Well, you've done amazing things, and we've known Ted for so many years when you were really just starting out and spreading your wings.
Ted: Eight years ago.
Dawn: And now. And now you're soaring. So thank you so much.
Ted: 1100 kids in 15 schools.
Dawn: It's incredible all that you do. And everyone knows Ted and Roots and Wings in the community. And they're going to.
Ken: Thank you ma'am. Well, it turns out to be Well, it's one of these things. It's like an iceberg. You look at what's going on with the kid, and it looks very simple. And it is. The kids love it, the teachers like it.
The real issue is it's a very simple program. It reads back and forth with kids, just like you would with a child that that you might be related to. It turns out that roughly half the kids in America in the third, fourth and fifth grades can't read very well because society has changed around them.
They've got phones, they've got videos, they've got all sorts of stuff. But sitting down with a book is not something that many kids do anymore. They used to, but not anymore. So, what we're doing is challenging that and coming back with some, I'll call it structured reading practice.
And we have access to about a million, books that we've made available. There's a not-for0profit called Bookshare that provides the books. So we've got almost any book you'd ever want to read. And it operates, as I say, on a quite simple basis.
The computer reads a sentence, the kid reads a sentence, the computer reads, the turns go back and forth, and the computer listens to everything the student reads, down to the phoneme level.
It analyzes the reading, and then comes back later and says “Hey, I heard yesterday when you were reading with me that you had some trouble with these kinds of words. Let's practice those.”
Or “You read this sentence, and I (the computer) will listen to how you read it”. And the student hears their mistake. Now take a better shot at it and they take a second shot and correct themselves. And that self-correction really is powerful. It's all.
Dawn: Done on computers?.
Ken: Smartphones. Runs on an iPhone or an iPad, a Chromebook, a regular computer. We haven't got it running on Android phones yet, but that's coming in March, I think. But yes, yes, it's quite easy to use.
Ted: They listened through headphones.
Dawn: This is your system, your platform that you created.
Ken: Yes, ma'am. Some friends of mine and I a couple of other old guys like me who've had careers that want to do something more interesting, and a whole bunch of young engineers that are really cranking out great ideas. We started off some years back working on games for blind kids where they could use audible signals to know that they're driving a car and so forth and so on. And we migrated that technology into this product, and we again started there with dyslexic kids and have moved now into general education. So, it's it turns out almost any kid that has a reading issue or an adult can use this
Freddie: To get better. That is a tremendous program.
Dawn: What can you program? Anything. What can you program into it?
Ken: Well, you don't program really anything into it. You give it a book and it could be a book in Spanish. It could be a book in French. We're working on English. Wow. And it reads the book and talks with the kid about the book. In fact, we've just launched a comprehension system for BuddyBooks.
People said, well, you're teaching them how to read. And they roughly, if they use it for a year, the kids jump about two grade levels in reading capability. So, kids can catch up.
But then what do you do about comprehension? How do you know whether they actually understand what they're reading, which is very important.
Our comprehension system now is running. We've tested it, I've tested it, I've screamed at it. I've tried to make it upset with me.
Basically, it fires up and ask the child or whomever is reading, how do you like the book? What about this or that or the other? And it talks with the kid about the book, just like you would do with a child that was reading a book that you knew about.
You'd ask them, you know, about the plot, or you'd ask them about the character. What do they think the person did right or wrong? The computer does this and it listens to their answers, and it doesn't grade them, but it comes back with a a comprehension score. How well did they seem to recognize the key pieces of the of the plot?
We haven't released it yet for the general use among teachers, but we've run it by a number of teachers, and they're fascinated. The kids are over the moon about having a conversation with a computer that actually answers their questions and talks to them and so forth about the book. So, it's we think it's going to be a big deal. It is.
Dawn: Amazing. And you can integrate it with, I guess, any type of anything that's reading.
Ken: Yes. It'll well, it doesn't do too well with comic books or graphic novels simply because there's too many pictures and sometimes all you've got is the picture to give you the context for the for the little words in the bubble. But with a regular book and as I say, almost any book you can imagine it we break it down into computer sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph, or if the kid is really struggling like some young ELL kids - English Language Learners - are.
It basically reads a sentence and then asks the kid to read the same sentence, and they basically read each sentence together. And kids improve remarkably quickly in that environment. The other thing is in criticizing them and telling them to fix their mistakes, they don't care. It's a computer. It's not a person. It's not a teacher. It's not their mom. It's not somebody that they would feel threatened by. It's a computer game.
Dawn: It's judgment free.
Ken: Yeah. And I don't know if you've played computer games. I lose lives in computer games all the time. Right. And then what do you do? You head.
Dawn: Over.
Ken: And you start over again. Exactly. That's what. That's what these kids are doing. And Ted's got a school. J.C. Mitchell elementary here. And Ashley Kluth, the teacher that's using it. She actually shows the kids their scores. At the end of the day, they can see how many words a minute they're reading. They can see how accurately they're reading, and they see they're making progress. You see progress. And that just reinforces how happy they are. And I should show him the Thank You notes I get from these kids.
Ted: Right.
Freddie: It's amazing because when I was going through the school system, they had these tests that you used to take, and then everybody got a colored book you were.
Freddie: I didn't speak English well, and to me, for reading English was even worse. So, I could read the words. But it wasn't registering this thing. All of a sudden you got a chance to talk to somebody – a computer - and it's explaining what you're reading. This is tremendous.
Ken: Yeah, you're 100% right. And kids that by the time they get to the fourth or fifth grade, if they can't read the psychological issues around being the dumbest kid in the class or being stupid or your friends, you don't want to read out loud, you're afraid you'll make a mistake. All those psychological issues just way, way down on the kids. Absolutely. And it causes them to not want to try.
But Ted knows this very well. Once you get them motivated, once they start to try, and once they start to see the progress, they kick butt. It is really amazing.
Dawn: They're so successful.
Freddie: That's tremendous.
Ted: And the other thing which I think is very important is, as you know, we have an memorandum of understanding with the school district. So, there is a set of books. There are 250 books from Scholastic that are already approved by the school district, by the governor, by the state of Florida. And then in addition to that, each school, every teacher, in order to have books be used, they've had to put those books in.
So, it isn't like there's only a couple of books for kids to read. There are all kinds of books. And the real key is if you say to the system, hey, I'm interested in sports or I'm interested in snakes or whatever, there are lots of books about that, and you can follow your interests while you're learning how to read, because again, following interests. Help you want to read? If you want to read something that you have no interest in, it begins to be kind of boring pretty fast, you know? Right.
Dawn: Incredible.
Freddie: It's an incredible piece.
Dawn: How do people reach out to Ted for you, for Roots and Wings, or to get more information to you?
Freddie: How are you going to launch this thing?
Ken: Well, we have launched it. We've got, I think, 2,000 kids at the moment that have used it over the last year. And we're like, there's a big after school program in Naples that's firing up come January 1st. We've got it in some schools here. We've got it in charter schools in New York.
So we're getting it out there as fast and as far as we can. The issue is that because it's new, it takes a while to filter through the bureaucracy that surrounds school districts and things like that. And it isn't that people aren't impressed and don't want to help.
It's there's a whole set of procedures you've got to go through to get it into schools that actually work. So we're trying a multidisciplinary and multi-channel approach to marketing and getting it out there.
And in general, it takes about five minutes to understand it. If I were to demonstrate it for you, you'd see immediately how it works. Kids don't have any trouble at all. They're pretty good at this. And the teachers? The dashboard is pretty full of information.
All the data about how the kid is doing that takes a little bit more time to get on top of. But according to Ashley Kluth over at J.C. Mitchell, it took her about an hour to get up to speed. There's really no training. There's no software to load, there's no security issues. There are no privacy issues. We don't take any information about the kid at all. We could care less, right? All we're interested in is, is processing their reading and telling them how well they're doing.
Dawn: Well, thank you so much for all that you did. Thank you so much for bringing him in and for coming in as well.
Ted: Well, you know how interested I am in sharing great things that are going on in education. And this is something that I thought would be of interest to all of you and your listening audience. And the one thing he doesn't like to blow his own horn very much, but they got a grant from National Science Foundation in order to pursue this and to, to develop it further.
And so it's not just pie in the sky that some crazy man decided he wanted to. And then later on, he'll be sticking some stuff in there that somebody else might not want. Right. It's something that’s really down a pathway that I think can really make a difference, especially when we have so many children that are speaking Creole as a primary language or Spanish is a primary language.
This is something that where they can start to assimilate into our system. We have dual language schools. Jupiter is basically 100% Spanish speaking kid, Jake Mitchell, is almost 100%. Lake Park Elementary is Creole speaking, almost 100% small school in the middle of a crazy place that nobody wants to go up north.
Dawn: What's the best way for people to reach out to you?
Ted: I think you can almost now go to just Roots and Wings, Delray Beach or Boca Raton or something and find us, but.
Ken: Or on our site. Look at ObjectiveEd.com
Dawn: Thank you, gentlemen, so much for joining us.
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