About Me
Hello! My name is W. Greg McCall
I'm a special education teacher in Hawaii, and
very interested in subject of literacy. I teach
Special Education English Literature and Reading. From my beginning days as a teacher I was shocked at how little time
secondary students actually spend in reading activities. I watched
teachers struggling to keep students in class and on task. I began to
look for ways to take advantage of my students strengths
---A few years ago I came across a
very simple idea for improving the literacy amongst struggling reader
populations.
(Please note that the majority of USA High School students are
‘struggling readers' with reading performance below 7th G.E.)
The format is called Same-Language-Subtitling (SLS). SLS is the use of Synchronized Captioning of Musical Lyrics (or any text with an Audio/Video/ source) as a Repeated Reading activity.
The application has many possibilities in both television and in education. This approach to enriching reading is legitimate --Google gave a 25 million dollar grant to the India based study: http://planetread.org/home.php and the OLPC program has a version of program with music pre-loaded on their laptops.
This
format includes not only the viewing and responding to subtitled media
but also the opportunity for students to design and create their own
surtitled projects. For class activities we use a free program called
Karafun (www.karafun.com)
My students really love it, it is easy, intuitive, and can use any mp3,
jpeg, or even .avi to rapidly make dynamic syllabicated subtitling. My
students also use it with poetry and famous speech.
You can see samples of my student's karaoke projects at my study web site: www.sls4reading.com, just look for SLS samples: Musicals and Other Genres.
The only U.S. educational use I know of (besides my classroom and study) is:“Tune-into-Reading”, a “learn to read while learning to sing” program. They can be found at: http://www.elpcorp.com/content.cfm?page_id=187 They are same company that does the "Carry-A-Tune SingingCoach" program.
SLS has enormous educational potential --even if just added to MTV.
Thanks
for reading this and I hope you will consider some of these ideas for
exploration.
For further info please access and explore:
Greg McCall , Hawaii:
www.sls4reading.com
Dr Brij Kotari, India:
http://planetread.org/home.php
www.Bookbox.com
http://desilassi.com/index.php
(Explanation) http://desilassi.com/about_us.php
Dr. Susan Homan, Florida:
http://www.elpcorp.com/content.cfm?page_id=187
My educational
background is a little mixed; I have professional degrees in
Special Education and Reading Instruction and Undergraduate and
Master’s Studies in Theater from the University of Hawaii. I earned my Master's in Curriculum and Technology in 2005 from the University of Phoenix. I have spent a good deal of time studying the impact of captioned audio and video on reading growth.Now I work with computers and technology. I love teaching reading. Most of the kids that I work with come to me with almost a
hatred for reading tasks, and I get to help them find the joy of
reading. I get to play work with Harry Potter and
William Shakespeare, how much better can life get?