Lesson 8 - Educational Software

One type of educational software that is available at my school is Read Naturally. Our school district just purchased this software at the beginning of this past year.  I don’t teach language arts, I’m the social studies teacher, but there are times when I have students with special needs that may need to use this program in my area with computers. It’s important for me to know about the program so I can help the students if they have questions, and also so I can help other teachers since I’m one of our school’s technology coordinators.

 Read Naturally is a software program that develops fluency, supports vocabulary, and promotes comprehension.  Read Naturally has many different steps involved in the process. Each student has a login name, and get to pick a story on their level.  After picking a story, they can make predictions based on the title, picture clues, etc. They read along with the story (using headphones) and they can do this several times to hear it over and over again. This can help with pronunciation, expression, and phrasing. While practicing they can use a microphone to talk into, and practice reading the story, and practice pronunciation. The next step has them answer comprehension questions about the story. The last step is for the student to read the story to the teacher, and the teacher will document their errors (if any) and then see if the student has met their goal of no more than 3 errors, and answered all the comprehension questions correctly. Although, I have not used this with my students yet since I’m still learning it and it’s SUMMER BREAK!!! I will definitely use this software next school year.

There are some challenges that come with this software. One is the computer’s we have. Our school is next on the district upgrade list (thank goodness) which means we are going through the process of starting to get new computers in our school. We have very limited access to computers in our school, and a lot of the computers that we do have are so old that they don’t really run the program in a manner that benefits the students (really slow). Also, we only have 10 computers in the 5^th grade, so this can cause an issue of who is using them, and at what times. Luckily for me I have a lot of parent involvement at my school, so if I need extra help at getting the computers ready and students prepared to use Read Naturally, I know I can count on them to be there to help me! I look forward to seeing my students’ reading abilities continue to grow!