It is difficult to focus on each student's reading difficulties in the classroom. The fact that these difficulties exist results in the students being ashamed to express themselves and communicate correctly. This tool helps students to work at their own pace with their difficulties and it allows teachers to work individually with their students in a simple way.
Beefluent was tested in a school environment with excellent results. The teacher creates the reading activity by copy/pasting or writing the text, records it with his voice, synchronizes the text and the voice and sends it to the student. Several questions can be grouped together to assess not only the fluency and accuracy of reading, but also to assess the understanding of what the student is reading. After answering the questions, the student turns in the task and the teacher can assess the students accuracy, fluency and understanding of the activity. The tool was developed by a team of students and teachers from IPT, and was later improved and developed by Teckies, who intend to disseminate it. Some additional features are being created for the next releases.
In the last year the main success was the completion and testing of the tool. The pandemic put great financial restrictions on schools, so the business model for Portugal had to be completely changed. Our web application is intended as a sustainable social project in nature and that's why we want it to be free for everyone.
In the coming years we will have three challenges:
(1) The larger scale implementation of this tool, not only in Portugal, but also in other European countries, that is, internationalization.
(2) Creation of additional features for this tool, such as new types of questions, text to speech, etc.
(3) New language developments.
In case you want to try it, please contact contacto.geral@beefluent.eu in order to get a free user(s) (student and teacher) to test all the functionalities of this tool
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