There is no shortage of learning apps available for school-aged children.
Few, however, are developed by women founders. Even fewer include features so revolutionary they qualify for U.S. patent protection.
Read Ahead is among the rare few.
Read Ahead is an AI-driven application that, in minutes, takes any piece of digital text and turns it into a fully customized, interactive reading assignment that can be completed on digital device—be it a smartphone, tablet or laptop.
Founder, Dr. Roxanne Russell, and her team have been granted a U.S. patent that protects the app’s unique features which include:
A black and white text player that improves concentration and focus for users.
An artificial intelligence that skims key ideas and chunks reading assignments into manageable pieces to boost critical thinking.
Interactivity that allows users to play with the flow of words and engage directly with the text to demonstrate comprehension.
Developed by Russell, an Instructional Designer with over 20 years of experience in higher learning, and a parent of two herself, Read Ahead takes the biggest thing that distracts kids from after school reading—their penchant for digital devices—and turns it into the opposite: a simple way to get kids reading (and loving it, too).
While Read Ahead is new to the consumer market, the app has been in testing and development for several years. Research conducted using Read Ahead has been recognized and cited in dozens of publications and today, thousands of teachers are using Read Ahead in the classroom with promising results.
“While co-directing the U. S. Department of Education’s National Reading Research Center from 1992-1997 and since then while serving as editor of Reading Research Quarterly, I have evaluated and observed the development and implementation of many reading programs. Never, however, have I found a program that equals Read Ahead in terms of its flexibility, accessibility, and integration of content delivery methods,” says Donna Alvermann, UGA Appointed Distinguished Research Professor of Language & Literacy Education.
With Read Ahead, kids are encouraged and supported to read what they want on the media that they prefer and they’re able to do so distraction-free through the app’s patented black and white text reader. Even better, Read Ahead’s functionality helps readers expand their vocabulary and critical thinking in a way that traditional classroom reading assignments don’t.
Read Ahead is currently offered free for educators in the U.S. through Clever.com and available to consumers for just $36 per year at www.readahead.ai.
About Read Ahead
Read Ahead transforms any digital text into a guided reading activity in seconds. You can use Read Ahead with new web content that you want to read today and create engaging reading experiences across all levels and content areas.
Read Ahead reinforces reading strategies and critical reading by inviting you to create your own reading presentations with custom word choices. Our Wordlist tool lets you emphasize signal words or grammatical structures in any digital content you want to read.
Read Ahead reinforces vocabulary by manipulating the flow of words in your reading process- simulating the isolation of vocabulary recall during the reading process. By disrupting the usual presentation of text, Read Ahead emphasizes how vocabulary functions in and out of context.
Read Ahead skims the text and finds the key ideas for you to get synapses firing off about concepts in passages before you read them. This front-loading technique is proven to help readers cross-reference, establish schema and make predictions.
We keep it simple and focus on the words. Black and white text. How readers move through a reading experience. What choices readers make when they read.
We invite you to create custom reading presentations and share your work with others. Browse public groups and public presentations to see how others read. Compare your reading experiences with readers across the world.
