Dyslexia
- From the Greek difficulty with words
- Covers many more specific conditions
- Overlaps with other learning difficulties
- 10% of population affected
- 4% severely
Research
- Much remains unknown
- Affects all sorts of people
- Dyslexia provides strengths as well as difficulties
Difficulties
- Reading hesitantly
- Misreading, making understanding difficult
- Difficulty with sequences, for example getting dates in order, remembering the letters of the alphabet, the days of the week, multiplication tables and the order of letters in words
- Poor organisation or time management
- Difficulty organising thoughts clearly
- Erratic or bizarre spelling
Strengths
- Innovative thinkers
- Excellent trouble shooters
- Intuitive problem solving
- Creative in many different ways
- Lateral thinkers
Albert Einstein
Leonardo de Vinci
Thomas Edison
Alexander Graham Bell
Winston Churchill
George Washington
Thomas Jefferson
John F. Kennedy
Hans Christian Andersen
Richard Branson
William Hewlett
Steve Redgrave
John Lennon
Robin Williams
Pablo Picasso
The Other Side of the Coin
- Traditional teaching methods often unsuited
- UK Prison populations show poor levels of literacy and numeracy
- Dyslexics often like to see the whole picture
- Learn best through kinesthetic senses
DysCypher
- My parents run the Farnborough Dyslexia & Learning Centre
- My mother is a fully qualified special educational needs consultant
- My sister has a BSc in Speech Science from University College London
- Some of my family are dyslexic
Teaching Method
- Learn through making neural connections
- Reinforce the connections
- Multi-sensory repetitive technique
Exercises
- Exercises range from the simple
- MY MUM IS FUN
- to the complicated
- sets of exercises following a theme
- Simplest exercises in UPPER CASE
Stimulate the brain
- The method looks at ways to stimulate the brain
- good nutrition
- drinking plenty of water
- balancing activities
- coordination activities such as juggling
- thinking, memorising, music
- regular and sufficient sleep
Conditions
- This method can help those with dyslexia
- dysphonetic
- dyseidetic
- other speech and language disorders
- dyscalculia
- dyspraxia
- behavioural difficulties such as ADD/ADHD
SureSpell
- In 2000 my parents needed a program to do this
- I took a little time off to write SureSpell
- Display text on screen
- Play recording of text
- Students type in text
- Multi-sensory repetitive approach
SureSpell
- Written in Perl
- Needs to run on Windows and Linux
- Use Tk for GUI
- Based on the canvas widget
- Use Win32::API::Prototype
- Fork, exec, sleep, kill
SureSpell
- Exercise is displayed in full at start
- Exercise read aloud
- Students over-type the words between one and three times
- Words and letters can be played as required
- Exercise read aloud again at end
- Tutors discuss exercise with pupil
Ing-er-land
SureSpell
- Since we are in Portugal
Colour
- Very important to dyslexic brain
- Meares-Irlen syndrome
- Students select six colours
- Also used for other exercises
Rewards
- Students get a reward at the end of each exercise
- Clearing the screen somehow
- Very basic
- Students seem to enjoy them
Progress
- Student performance data is collected
- Exercise date, duration, mistakes etc.
- Allows progress graphs to be displayed
- Stored using Data::Dumper, YAML or Storable
Data
- Exercise and Student information entered in Surespell itself
- Spoken words stored in mp3 files
- Separate files for exercises and individual words
- Exercise creation is the real skill
Progress
- Two one-hour lessons per week
- Average learning rate increased five fold
- Up to fifteen times
- Depends a lot on willingness to learn
Conclusions
- Surespell and DysCypher exercises, individual tuition and effort allows students to improve their
- ability to read, write, spell and communicate
- confidence, interest and ability to learn
- coordination
- behaviour and relationships with others
Conclusions
- Perl, Tk and CPAN made it easy
- Working well for five years
- Minimum of maintenance
- Cross platform
- Core of a very successful programme