Riverside, California (NAPSI) - There’s good news for students who learn differently and those who teach them.
Learning Ally, a national nonprofit, is considered a critical resource by thousands of students across the country who have learning disabilities like dyslexia, blindness or visual impairment, and has the world’s largest library of human-narrated audio textbooks—more than 77,000 titles.
Learning Ally has also built a community of support, giving teachers and parents the tools needed to help students succeed.
For parents, the organization provides personalized consultations, interactive webinars and assistance in finding specialists. For teachers, it offers professional training and a learning management system, known as Teacher Ally, which is designed to help them maximize their audiobook resources.
Allison Mitchell, a special educator in Denver, Colorado who works with students who have dyslexia and visual impairments, says, “With Learning Ally, I can organize book assignments and track my students’ progress. I love that the audiobooks available for download match exactly the re_quired textbooks in my students’ curriculum. I like how easy Learning Ally is to use.
“The students enjoy the functionality of the Learning Ally app for playing audiobooks,” she adds, “because it makes it easy for them to find the chapter and the pages they need to read. Best of all, they love the fact that listening to books on their smartphone or tablet doesn’t make them look different from their peers. They can plug in their earbuds and it looks like they are listening to music, when they are actually doing a reading assignment.”
Another Denver-based teacher, Lauren Sabo, believes part of what makes the materials effective is that they offer students control over the experience. “Students like it better than other tools,” she says, “because they can speed up or slow down the books, and they really enjoy the Learning Ally Audio app description of charts and diagrams feature. Without Learning Ally, students might fall through the cracks.”
At South High School, Allison Mitchell describes one of her students with dyslexia, Katrina, who has benefited greatly from her use of audiobooks. “It takes a long time for Katrina to read on her own, but audiobooks have given her the opportunity to take courses she otherwise wouldn’t be able to manage,” Mitchell says. “With access to these tools in the classroom, students can challenge themselves, and teachers are better able to lead them to college or a successful career.”
Learning Ally has served millions of K-12, college and graduate students, as well as veterans and lifelong learners - all of whom cannot read standard print due to blindness, visual impairment, dyslexia or other learning and physical disabilities. Learn more at www.LearningAlly.org.
