On this site, you will discover a new application idea called Claritoon. The objective behind this is to develop an easy-to-use application for elementary educators and any specialists supporting students with special needs or disabilities to support in-classroom tasks or homework at home.
According to various research and studies, it is well-known that the teaching profession is associated with high levels of perceived stress (Wolgast & Fischer, 2017). Past studies summarize the reasons behind this stress, including a lack of balance between demands and resources and poor working conditions (Kyriacou, 2001, as cited in Wolgast & Fischer, 2017).
Rationale
One of the main challenges I face as a primary school year teacher is the need for more support and resources in the classroom. Trying to manage the class with students from diverse backgrounds, abilities, and conditions, especially planning learning activities for non-readers when there are 20 students with one adult in the room, can be difficult. Although I differentiate the activity to the best of my ability, I always wish for more assistance in supporting our students to show their brilliant ideas and thoughts. Since in kindergarten, grade 1, and even in some grade 2 and 3 classes, a handful of students are learning to read and write with a short attention span, often, students need more understanding of the task and easily get distracted when the support is absent. I would visualize the task, write on the board, and let them repeat the concise and clear instructions, yet they still have questions and require support in starting and understanding the assignment. Trying to overcome these problems, we thought of a solution to an AI video generator supporting educators and students.
Existing Technologies
Several programs, applications, and websites exist to help learners struggling with readers. A few examples include:
Speechify
an application that reads text aloud to speech voice.
Microsoft Immersive Learner
a tool designed for education to improve reading comprehension by text-to-speech, font customization, and background colour adjustments
Story Jumper
a tool to create storybooks
Learning Alley
an application that provides a digital library with audiobooks
Problem
However, we could not find a tool that suited our primary audience, early elementary school teachers and students, that provided reading instructions with video and images to support learning. Existing text-to-speech applications were primarily for adults and focused on read-aloud books. Also, some created videos that were unengaging for a younger audience and lacked interactivity. The existing tools needed to be simplified enough to target younger students. There were also security and privacy issues due to the requirement to create an account with personal information to access the tools. Most importantly, it did not necessarily reduce the workload for teachers since rather complicated steps were required to either set up or teach the students to use them in class.