New Synthetic Phonics Literacy Activity

[Mike Dawson]

Hi All,

As many of the target areas for the XOs suffer from massive illiteracy
problems, and some live away from where schools will be built during
the time that they grow up and could benefit from a literacy learning
activity using home schooling.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/SynPhony

Norbert Rennert has done work on a prototype Synthetic phonics based
application that can pick out appropriate words from a list according
to learner's levels and the phonics being stressed.  Then we have
espeak that can handle text to speech.

We can migrate this to using HTML 5 for it's database and built it as
an offline application (which could then use any other source to
update word lists etc).  We can then define a means to link words to
other media such as images.

We have no shortage of potential test beds here in Afghanistan that
could benefit massively, illiteracy is at the heart of many problems
here.  If we can support the mass production of literacy learning
experiences then that could have a significant positive impact.

Contributors both in terms of those involved in linguistics and
literacy (we have people for Dari and Pashto) as well as those
familiar with the involved technologies would be most appreciated.  I
will myself be focusing on this and have reasonable experience with
Javascript, SQL, etc.  We are working on a Dari version of espeak that
is in prototype at the moment.

Regards,

-Mike