Activities: ReadAloud by Poodll
How well are your student's reading?
ReadAloud helps you answer this question in three simple steps...
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Students read
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Read Aloud evaluates
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Teachers get actionable data
The teacher selects a level-appropriate reading passage. Students record themselves reading the passage aloud. When they are finished, ReadAloud grades the attempt automatically and provides words per minute (WPM) and accuracy scores. Languages presently supported for auto-grading include: English, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese. Manual grading is supported via an intuitive interface. Students are able to view their scores, listen to their readings, and see which words were marked as incorrect.
Use Cases
Native Speakers
In first language contexts, ReadAloud is most often used for reading practice, assessment, and progress monitoring. Many educational authorities require students to reach a certain level of reading proficiency before advancing to the next grade. ReadAloud makes it easy for teachers to collect measures of oral reading ability that can be shared with parents, administrators, and other stakeholders.
Language Learners
ReadAloud is also used extensively in language learning. Curricula that include extensive reading or speed reading programs use ReadAloud to measure changes in reading speed and accuracy via pre- and post-testing. Mismatches between the transcription of a student's reading and the original passage provides language learners with valuable feedback on pronunciation. Students are able to reattempt the task multiple times with the purpose of improving their pronunciation of certain words.
Getting Started
ReadAloud requires a Poodll API username and secret. These are available with a free trial or paid subscription to Poodll. To get your API username and secret:
- Visit the ReadAloud page at poodll.com
- Take a "30 day Free Trial" and try our ReadAloud demo course
- Register your Moodle site URL on your member page
- Pick up your Cloud Poodll API user and secret
You can install Poodll ReadAloud as usual from the Moodle plugins directory. After installation you will be asked for your API user and secret. Please see the Poodll ReadAloud support documentation for more information on installing and using Read Aloud.
About Poodll
Poodll has been making plugins for Moodle since 2011. Our software has helped teachers build and deliver language courses in thousands of Moodle websites worldwide. Search for "Poodll" in the Moodle Plugins directory to see a list containing more than 25 of our plugins. Poodll is based in Nagasaki, Japan.
Useful links
Screenshots
We are using read aloud in primary school to train the fluency in french as a foreign language. We provide a model reading of the entire passage using the description area by recording ourselves (thanks to PoodLL in atto), and for the practice we sometimes use a PoodLL widget (the audio recorder you can see in the screenshot).
As you can see in the screenshot, our "problem" mainly comes from the presentation of activities in moodle: the Read Aloud activity is not easy to spot for young users (as of any other moodle activity) therefore I link most of the activities to a picture (the red button bellow).
I cannot thank Justin enough for his plugins, and I guess it's a bit late for a change, however I suppose that a more visible logo-design for the RA activity could be helpfull.
PS: TTS is not available on our moodle 2.9.5
PS2: Once open, the activity is modifying elements of my theme (mostly from the header menu)
I will copy this post to the forum with screenshots,
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I tested Mohamed's suggestion earlier today. I thought it might be possible to add an audio player by changing to HTML format in the drop-down menu, but that wasn't the case. I think there are two possible options here: one is to follow Camille's suggestion above and add a recording to the description area; the other is to use a plug-in designed to encourage students to follow a pronunciation model. One such plug-in that comes to mind is Voice Shadow. I'm not sure that it's available in the Moodle plugins database, but it can be downloaded from Github. Voice Shadow also has a mobile app that extends the plug-in for use with smartphones.
I'd like to use the tool for speaking. How can I change Begin Reading to Record?
Thanks
Thanks a lot for your reply,
I managed to compile a code to hide the audio player. here it is
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1BVuLGFV6kANERncVczMzJESzQ/view?usp=sharing
It shows the text and a button named "click to listen" and once clicked the button and the text disappears and the audio starts
But if the student reloaded the page the button appears again. Any suggestions?
(I have no skills in coding, I just tried and tried till it worked)
Thanks
The activity allows me to test the mic, then the "start activity" button appears. I click on start activity, but the reading passage fails to appear. Please help
Thanks
The setup basics for ReadAloud and other Cloud Poodll plugins are the same. You can see more details here. https://poodll.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/19000093860-getting-started-with-cloud-poodll
Thx