ReadToMe

65% of American students do not read at grade level. Globally 250 million primary kids cannot read. Low literacy translates into a lifetime of missed opportunities. One of the reasons for low literacy is that there are not enough teachers to listen to all students and provide feedback. ReadToMe does just that. It listens to students read any text aloud and provides immediate feedback on their fluency, accuracy, comprehension, and overall reading proficiency. If scaled globally, ReadToMe could teach millions of people to read and unlock a lifetime of new possibilities.

Every student should graduate reading at or above grade level. However, 65% of American students read below grade level. This has several causes. First, is teacher capacity. The average teachers spends 200+ hrs grading and 90+ hours on oral assessments. Many educators teach more than a hundred students. They do not have the capacity to listen to all their students read. Students also do not practice enough. In order to improve literacy, students need to read for 20 minutes a day or more, hear examples of quality reading, and practice reading aloud themselves. Yet more than half of American students read for less than 15 minutes a day, do not hear strong examples, and do not get a chance to practice oral reading. By high school students read for 8 minutes or less. One reason is that the majority of American students do no have access to updated libraries. 2.4 million American students have no access to a library in their community. Students who do not read at grade level earn 34% less than their peers and are four times as likely to drop out of high school. In short, low literacy skills translates into a lifetime of missed opportunities.

ReadToMe is a digital platform for teachers and students that has two key benefits. It increases the time that students spend reading and improves the quality of their reading practice by delivering meaningful, instantaneous feedback. Here’s how it works: teachers assign a text to students, who access it on a mobile device of their choice. Second, students listen to an excerpt of their teacher reading as an example. Then students read the rest of the text aloud while ReadToMe listens. Third, as students are reading, they receive actionable feedback. ReadToMe tells them which words they said incorrectly, shows them how to pronounce these words correctly, and teaches the student their meaning. Students also see how long they read so they can set and reach reading goals. This data is then analyzed, organized, and communicated to teachers on a classroom dashboard. ReadToMe utilizes Google's speech to API. The technology uses the programming language Dart, Flutter, and Firebase

ReadToMe serves three groups: students, teachers, and administrators. ReadToMe impacts students lives because it gives them the gift of, as one student put it, "performing for a low-risk audience." They also get the immediate feedback without having to wait for teachers. Teachers love ReadToMe because it saves them 200+ hours of time by reducing time spent testing, grading homework and listening to all students read. As one teacher user said, "for a teacher, the coolest thing it fills in a gap for decoding that I can’t manage unless it’s being recorded." Simply put, administrators and teachers have no cost-effective way of knowing who in their school is struggling with reading and lack the resources/capacity to measure total reading over the course of the year. With ReadToMe, now they do.

For girls who cannot attend school for whatever reason, they can access our library and technology from their home so they learning can continue despite being denied access at school. One other challenge is that women experience is not being called on the classroom to read. In fact studies show that girls speak less in class than boys. ReadToMe changes that. As one girl told us, "I used to be shy before ReadToMe but now I am not." ReadToMe empowers girls because it gives them a safe place to practice reading.

When students increase the time they spend reading, fluency and comprehension also increase. When students read aloud, they remember more than if they read silently. In the right setting, reading aloud also improves comprehension, confidence, and fluency. ReadToMe is a digital platform that increases the time students spend reading and improves the quality of their reading practice by delivering meaningful feedback. Here’s how it works: teachers assign any text to students, who then access it on a digital device of their choice. Second, students listen to an excerpt of their teacher reading as an example. Then students read the rest of the text aloud while ReadToMe listens. Third, as students are reading, they receive actionable feedback. ReadToMe tells them which words they said incorrectly, demonstrates correct pronunciation/meaning, and allows students to set reading goals. This data analyzed for teachers on a classroom dashboard. Existing alternatives are expensive, time consuming, and do not seamlessly integrate with teachers’ learning management systems. Traditional interventions like tutors are generally cost-prohibitive and teachers do not have the time to listen to every student read. Other Integrated speech technology platforms like Bamboo Books (an offshoot of Amazon), Google’s “Read Along”, and Duolingo have no classroom compatibility. ReadToMe is the only product that listens to students read books and articles of their choice and provides meaningful feedback. ReadToMe allows teachers to asynchronously monitor the quantity and quality of student oral reading. Educators who use our product have shared that these features are indispensable during distance learning.

We utilize google cloud speech-to-text API technologies as the key component. We are building from this foundational element to make our neural network proprietary to be inclusive of all accents. Additionally, we use existing machine learning infrastructures to convert student’s speech into valuable metrics. We built the platform using Dart, Flutter, and Firebase. Our user experience design was built by teachers for students that's informed by the most recent research in pedagogy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and through our experience of being embedded in the field.
We also are building a database on student language learning that makes our technology more precise which is helping us build our own speech to text recognition intellectual property.

The best people to answer this question are our users. The following quotes come from our most recent pilot. “I really like how we could record ourselves reading because hearing ourselves reading makes me improve my reading”  said Jose in 6th grade. “Hearing my students read was the highlight during distance learning” said Mrs. May 7th Grade. “I was able to hear myself read and was able to make improvements on what I needed to get better at” - Ellie in 8th grade said. “Kids actually read. This is what we needed for a long time.” -Mrs. Coolidge, 11th Grade. “I became a better reader and it was actually fun” - Laura 9th grade, “After ReadToMe I wasn't as shy as before” - DJ 4th grade. After using our product students and teachers have self-reported improvements in reading. We look forward to running more studies to determine how teachers are helping facilitate improved reading for students.

If students read aloud, then they will will improve their vocabulary and memory of a text. This is called the "production effect" as proven by the University of Waterloo. If students read to an audience then they will likely be more motivated to read which will increase total time reading. Research has shown that having an audience (even a dog) while reading improves student memory of the text and motivation because its grounded to a purpose that is centered on their demonstration of mastery of a certain skill. Research also has shown that students need to read for 20 minutes or more a day to improve their literacy. If students read out loud and have an audience they will increase the total time of their reading. Lastly, students need access to books. If students can easily access a library of content directly connected to the internet and curated by their teacher, they will read more. We tested these theories of action with 370 students in a middle school in San Diego California in June. This is what we learned. Students did read more. 30 minutes more than they would have otherwise. Students self-reported higher levels of confidence and comfort with reading-- particularly because they could hear themselves read (we didn't realize how much they would like this) and students improved in their fluency. To measure the overall impact we would want to see growth levels of students before and after on summative tests as well as on other metrics like grades and self-reported enjoyment of school. That is what we plan to do next.

Currently: 1,500. In one year we intend to grow to 131,600 by year one and to 3,985,600 by year five in the US market alone.

In year one our goal is to reach 175 schools and 131,000 students in the United States. We will do this our networks and partnerships. We will also pilot our product in international markets in Spain, India, Mexico, and China. Our goal in five years is to reach nearly four million kids across the US (11% of US students), and millions of students in China, India, Europe, and Africa. We will do this through partnerships with content providers, low cost to entry, and the networking effect.

In the next year we need to overcome the following goals. 1) Legal: Our approach to content needs to be in collaboration with publishers. 2) Technical: our accuracy features will improve over time as our data set expands. For teachers we need to communicate that our accuracy feature is an estimate that will be honed as they use it more. 3) Financial. We are committed to improving literacy for all students while maintaining that we will be financially viable. Budgets in education will be changing significantly due to COVID, so we need to plan for disruptions in spending in education. 4) Access: We want our product available in any place that has access to a smartphone. To reach students and girls in destitute environments we need to determine how we can make offline features as well as support resources/teachers for students that do not have a teacher that can assign readings.

We plan to overcome these barrier in the following ways: 1) Legal: We see our premium model as a way to collaborate with content providers. We can do this in two ways. First, schools will pay us for access to the content on websites through our premium version. Second, we seek payment for directing users to content providers. We can also charge content providers a fee to host our service on their website 2) Technical: Improving accuracy will get better as our data set improves. Something we can do to mitigate this involves partnering with organizations like SOAPBox who already have a large data set to supplement ours while we grow our user base. It's not an ideal fix, but that, combined with managing expectations of users can help us keep the accuracy feature relevant. Additionally, we are building the feature that allows students to touch each word, see it's definition, and how to say it correctly. 3) Financial: We are certain we can withstand the fluctuations in American education spending by taking our platform globally. 4) Access: One way we're thinking about this is partnering with nonprofit organizations that would want to use ReadToMe to reach readers in more challenging environments.

We have three full time employees. Our CEO, Drew Madson. Our COO Steve Askar, and our Principal Developer Will Smith. In addition, we have a team off five summer fellows who are high school and college students who support us in design, marketing, and research.

Drew Madson has launched initiatives at nearly every level of the education sector. He helped found an award-winning school, led as grade-level chair, and designed and facilitated professional development for all social studies teachers across his charter’s 15 schools. He is a Master Teacher with nine years of experience. As CEO he oversees product design, strategy and customer relations. He earned a Master’s in Technology, Innovation, and Education from HGSE. 

Steve Askar is an award-winning educator with a background in launching startups. As COO he focuses on fundraising, sales, marketing, and developer support. He earned a Master’s in School Leadership from HGSE and was the recipient of the Harvard Intellectual Achievement Award. Both Steve and Drew are Teach for America alumni. 

Will Smith develops ReadToMe as Chief Software Engineer. He brings 10+ years of development experience, has a background in education, and built a top 100 app on the global charts.

We are collaborating with schools in Denver, San Diego, Knoxville, and Minneapolis-- all places we have deep personal connections. We work together by listening to teachers/students share and explain their user needs so that we can optimize ReadToMe for their experience. For example, students gave us better ideas for how to utilize our page turning features, our recording function, and text functionality. After consultation with our lead developer we updated the pages, changed the recording button, and improved the text features. We shared this with students and they were ecstatic. We have high school students on our team who also help guide the design process by consulting with their network of peers and providing feedback so we can authentically support students actual needs. 

We offer a freemium/premium model. Our freemium features include unlimited copy and paste features, options to organize and set-up classrooms for teachers, and individual student data on words pe- minute accuracy, and total time read. This ensures our student users and teacher adopters can experience and make the most of our core features which will enable them to improve their reading for free. Our premium version costs $15 a year per student (sold directly to school leaders) and includes access to large content libraries and a data dashboard to monitor and track student reading over time. Teachers/administrators want data dashboards to understand student progress, set goals, and have a better understanding of how their students are doing. This also saves a lot of time. On average elementary school teachers spend 90+ hours on oral assessments and 200 hours on grading homework. ReadToMe saves them that time by immediately showing teachers who read, for how long, and what supports they need.

We will become financially sustainable by September Sept 21 through selling licenses to schools for $15 a student. To fund ourselves between Sept. 21 we have been raising funds through non-dilute grants/competitions. We have begun a seed round of funding with Angel investors and have a steady demand of sales.

We are deeply committed to helping solve the global literacy crisis. As educators we have seen too many students fall through the cracks because they did not have they support they deserved and teachers did not have the capacity to reach them. We are applying to SOLVE for several reasons. First, SOLVE will support us to think more expansively in how we can serve some of the most vulnerable populations especially girls by being able to collaborate with entrepreneurs who work in different sectors but have the same passion for improving the world for others. Second, some of the barriers we face-- particularly around speech recognition-- the MIT staff could help us with. We're immensely interested in working with Dr. Jim Glass who leads the Spoken Language Systems Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. This will help us hone our accuracy system while accounting for a diverse array of accents.

We are testing many assumptions with our business model and need expertise on how to think through our use of premium/freemium features with NGOs and nonprofits that are serving marginalized girls. We understand how to connect our product to schools, but we do not know how to do this while remaining profitable in areas that are more difficult to serve. We also need help thinking through international legal matters as we try to bring our product to new countries. Lastly, as we mentioned above, we're very curious about how to continually improve our speech recognition and know that we're going to need to be able to account for a large range of accentedness. We have some ideas about how to do this, but collaborating with MIT faculty will help us think more precisely about how to do this.

Dr. Glass and the Spoken Language Systems Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. We would like to show him our product, explain our current thinking for solving for accentedness, and get his feedback. The International Speech Communication Association for pushing our understanding of what is currently possible in the field and helping us think through how to do a study on our work.

Our product can be brought to scale for teaching refugee children how to improve reading. 

Women's voices are literally the core component of our product. We celebrate that by listening to girls read aloud in a safe environment of their choice and providing feedback so they can improve their reading. 

ReadToMe ensures any student, anywhere, can access a library and read aloud. We are dedicated to bringing this technology to the most marginalized learners on the planet so girls can become educated in whatever environment they find themselves in.

ReadToMe is a literacy platform that collaborates with children and their families to improve their reading. Adults can also use ReadToMe to practice their reading abilities.

AI and machine learning are the core components of ReadToMe's functionality. No one has yet cracked how best to listen to children and give them feedback. We're committed to figuring just that out. 

ReadToMe will reach millions of students in the next five years, reshaping their education to more dramatically improve their literacy. And literacy is arguably the skill that has the most impact on a person's life.