Eyeread, a Halifax startup whose technology helps children to read, has issued the following press release:

Education Technology Startup, Eyeread, partners with Halifax Learning Summer Camp

Halifax-based education technology startup, Eyeread is excited to announce that, this summer, it will be partnering with Halifax Learning Summer Camp to offer an innovative learning opportunity for children!

Summer is an important time for children to continue building the skills that will help them return to school ready and full of confidence.

According to the National Summer Learning Association, “All young people experience learning losses when they do not engage in educational activities during the summer.” They report that, “Research spanning 100 years shows that students typically score lower on standardized tests at the end of summer vacation than they do on the same tests at the beginning of the summer.”

This phenomenon of learning loss over the summer is commonly referred to as the “summer slide.”

Together, Eyeread and Halifax Learning have a winning strategy to prevent the summer slide and give students a head start come September.

Halifax Learning has helped over 3000 students in Nova Scotia develop excellent foundational reading skills using the SpellRead program. SpellRead’s comprehensive approach to developing sustainable reading skills has been reviewed by researchers both locally and internationally over the past 20 years and results are available on our website: http://www.halifaxlearning.com . Halifax Learning is looking forward to partnering with Eyeread this summer to explore how the addition of their technology will enhance students’ reading skills development even more.

Eyeread is the world's first affordable literacy accelerator for children that uses Artificial Intelligence on ebooks. The company is one of 198 teams that have been selected to compete in the Global Learning XPrize a four-year, $15M challenge to bring literacy to 250 million children around the world.

Eyeread is a unique reading assessment tool that uses infrared eyetracking and voice recognition to help children read independently, while providing realtime information to parents and educators. Eyeread detects when children are skipping paragraphs, reading right to left (instead of left to right), or getting stuck, and provides helpful prompts to help them get back on track. The application is built for children in grades P to 5, which are critical years for reading development.

Eyeread is also working closely with some of the strongest, most successful, results-oriented teachers in North America including K1 teacher, Katie Gillivan from the Booker IB School in Halifax and Grade 5 teacher, Brendan Lynch from the Thompson Brook School in Connecticut to develop effective learning strategies.

All children attending Halifax Learning Summer Camp will have the chance to try out the Eyeread software and participate in testing before and after they use it.

This testing will allow parents to see the progress their children have made, and will greatly add to our understanding of children’s needs as we all work together to improve reading proficiency. The end goal is always to help children develop literacy skills that meet or exceed grade level expectations!

To see Eyeread in action or find out more about the summer camp, you can also participate in a public demo at the Halifax Central Library in the BMO room (formerly Room 201) on June 24^th 9:30am 3:30pm.

There are limited spaces available for this year’s Halifax Learning Summer Camp but regular programming will also be available throughout the summer at all Halifax Learning locations.