Dyslexia News & Update: How Technology Helps Dyslexic Kids Love Reading

Dyslexia is seen in one among 10 people in the world. Over 40 million American adults are dyslexic and 2 million know about it. Dyslexia is a language-based learning disability including poor word reading, word decoding, oral reading fluency and spelling but the disability is not just about getting letters or numbers mixed up or out of order.

Today, technology is playing a major role in developing love for reading among dyslexic children. According to Dallas News, a certified academic language therapist and licensed dyslexia therapist at Griffis Elementary School in Caddo Mills, Leslie Patterson is using technology to help some of her dyslexic students to develop love for reading.

Patterson uses Bookshare to help students' access books they can read with both audio and video, as well as with highlighted text. Bookshare is known to be the world's largest digital library with 480,000 books.

"With the practice of reading with eyes and ears, you are learning words because you are seeing the words spelled correctly, you are hearing the word, as your eye is touching it, pronounced correctly, and over time, you are learning words because you are getting practice hearing and seeing them correctly," Patterson said.

Unfortunately, there are only a few schools in the U.S. that are using technology to help dyslexic students while in Australia, some parents are complaining for not using technology. A spokeswoman of Red Letter, Sarah Asome said kids with Dyslexia are marginalized due to the lack of support at school.

Asome said that some Australian schools say they have no students with Dyslexia, which is not true. They just have not identified them, 9news.com.au reported. Schools in Australia need to train teachers to identify dyslexic students to address their problems at early stages in the early years of school life. Students should be offered access to technology such as voice-to-speech technology and additional time should be provided to complete their tasks.