This is an extract from Education Insights, Issue 6: English and Literacy. Subscribe to read the article in full and unlock access to our quarterly insights reports.
subscribe nowContributors: Sigbjørn Dugal is the founder of Pickatale, a children’s reading app designed to help families and schools unlock the joy of reading. Emily Guille-Marrett is Chief Content Officer at Pickatale. Emily leads the content strategy, licensing and creation of Pickatale’s digital reading products, like Pickatale Create.
Q: What excites you about the potential for technology to help children to engage with reading and become better readers?
We’re focusing on not just reading engagement, but taking children from non-readers to readers: from learning to read to reading to learn. There’s huge potential for technology here. For the launch of Pickatale Create (and for safety reasons), teachers will drive the content curation. The teacher comes to the
product, enters the pupil’s reading age and desired topic, chooses the picture style, the narrator… and within minutes Pickatale Create (using AI) produces the book!
The extent matches the pupil’s age, and there’s a vast array of fiction and non-fiction to choose from. In the future, it will record how the pupil is interacting with the book and, as it learns more about their reading, it will be able to customise more books for them at the right interest and reading level.
Finding a way to get all excited about reading is the essence of Pickatale Create.
The platform can also generate audio and translations (through AI) for children who want to read in their own language. So we will be able to sell Pickatale Create into markets where English is not the primary language.
Q: What have you learnt so far from those using Pickatale Create?
From our alpha/beta testing data, we looked at how children learn, how to encourage them to start reading, and the quickest path to achieving this… Subscribe to keep reading Emily and Sigbjørn’s interview on literacy and AI and find out what they have learnt so far from those using Pickatale Create.
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