News

Robot assists students in class

By Scott Wagar

10/14/2014

For the staff and students at Dunseith’s elementary school, they have a new instructor that looks very interesting in one way, but rather odd in other ways.

“It’s an iPad on a stick,” said Rebecca Ward with a laugh who is the principal of the Dunseith Elementary School.

“It’s a robot learning device with the Lindamood-Bell, a learning center which offers reading and comprehensive programs that are headquartered in California,” Ward continued.

“The device is controlled by Therese Mayo, who is employed with Lindamood-Bell. She appears on an iPad screen and assists our school in Lindamood-Bell’s Visualizing and Verbalizing program (VVP).”

Mayo doesn’t actually live in California, her home is in North Carolina and she controls Lindamood-Bell’s robot from her office in that state.

“We provide the Wi-Fi and Therese does the rest,” Ward said. “The robot is stored in my office and each morning Therese logs on to the robot, says good morning to me, we talk about the weather and then she leaves my office, by herself through the robot, and goes to the classes she will be monitoring in.”

PROGRAM
 
Mayo at one time was an elementary school teacher, but she accepted a position with Lindamood-Bell to be one of its mentors. Mayo’s goal, through the robot, is to give school’s teachers support, while educating the students at the same time.

“Therese mentors the teachers who deliver VVP. When you’re in the classroom it looks like she is doing the lesson, but she isn’t, the teacher instructs the students and Therese models the program,” Ward said.

“She is modeling for the teacher. Not only does she provide the observation piece of watching and giving feed back, but she also models students in the program and assists them as well.”

Ward stated the students in Dunseith need Lindamood-Bell’s VVP because they have scored low on oral and comprehensive tests.

“When it comes to family, parents normally instruct their children. Parents say, ‘Do this,’ ‘Don’t do that,’ ‘Don’t do this;’ but, they don’t sit down and talk to the kids so they don’t have that type of conversation with their children,” Ward said.

“And that is what we are trying develop with the program. We want the students to start discussing and conversing about what they are actually reading. We are re-training the brain.

“We also teach the students to do some self re-correction. In other words, if they paint a picture that is not accurate, then we start asking them what we call hot questions,” Ward said.

“We ask the students if the picture matches what they actually read, and the student will think about and say it doesn’t.”

“So, we teach them to do it again, read it again and paint another picture. We work toward matching what is in the book to what they are actually getting in the book,” she stated.

In Dunseith’s elementary school, the primary grades do sentence by sentence in the Visualizing and Verbalizing program, while the upper elementary students do paragraph by paragraph.

“As they get better we will go to section by section, which is very similar to the Close (Reading) Theory where the students read and write and place their thoughts in the margins of the book as to what they understand,” Ward said.

“But this is a public school and the students don’t buy their books, and that is destroying the book and we do not want to do that to public school books. So, this program closes matches to implementing that type of strategy with this theory in the classroom.”

BAZINGA

The staff and students have fallen in love with Mayo and her iPad apparatus, which literally consists of an iPad on top of the robot, with a long black skinny pole in the middle, with some high-tech wheels to keep the robot stabilized so Mayo can get around the school by trekking from classroom to classroom to conduct her monitoring (The stabilized wheels of her robot are important because Mayo goes in and out of four classes a day and to 14 classes throughout the week).  

The staff and students like Mayo and the robot device so much they have given her a nickname.

“We call her Sheldon because if you watch the television show, The Big Bang Theory, the character Sheldon was on a computer like this one at one time,” Ward said. “In fact, we had a t-shirt on Therese’s robot at one time with the saying ‘BAZINGA’ on it, which is one of Sheldon’s favorite words in the show.

“Therese wore it for a few days, but the mechanism which controls the robot is so sensitive she could feel the shirt on the mechanism and it made it hard for her to move around,” Ward added. “So, now she wears the shirt only on special occasions.”
It is a tradition at Lindamood-Bell to grant a name for each of the robots. Dunseith’s robot was named Lucky, but the staff and students like Mayo and The Big Bang Theory so much they call the two of them Sheldon instead.

COST

Dunseith School District made the decision to go with Lindamood-Bell’s robot because of the quality of the Center’s reading programs and the affordable cost that comes with Sheldon.

“Dunseith’s elementary school has been in association with Lindamood-Bell since 2007 with its school partnership program. We had to pay over $100,000 for the company to come in and assist the staff to deliver the program. At that time,

Lindamood-Bell had to send a person to Dunseith who would be here all year long. We would have to pay the travel, lodging and daily living expenses which equaled more than $100,000,” Ward said.

“We lost Lindamood-Bell for about two years because the funding just wasn’t there, but we continued to try to work with them. This year I was able to pull together some money and I called them up and said I wanted them back.

“We still use the program, but we didn’t have that support, and I wanted to get that back here. Lindamood-Bell told me about the robot and how it could cut the price down by $75,000. So, what we were getting for $100,000 we are now getting for $25,000,” Ward stated.

RESULTS
 
The Lindamood-Bell program has assisted the students greatly.
“Before we started this program only 38 percent of our students were proficient in reading and writing,” Ward said. “We are at about 53 percent right now.”

BEYOND
 
Outside of assisting the students in their reading skills, Mayo also has one-on-one conferences with the teachers to mentor them on the companies’ reading program.

And, besides working at Dunseith’s elementary school, Mayo is also bilingual and monitors teachers and students in Honduras by speaking the country’s primary language of Spanish.

For Ward, she is pleased with Lindamood-Bell’s robot program, and how it educates the students in her school.

“I think it is a new and more efficient way for providing support,” she said. “It is a neat item in feedback and support.”

LINDAMOOD-BELL

Lindamood-Bell is a top notch educational facility throughout the world.  

“Lindamood-Bell helps children and adults improve language processing, the foundation of all communication and learning.

For over 25 years, our intensive, process-based instruction has been used in Lindamood-Bell Learning Centers to strengthen the sensory-cognitive functions needed for reading and comprehension, and has proven successful for individuals with learning challenges, including dyslexia, ADHD, CAPD and ASD,” stated Lindamood-Bell’s website.

“In addition to our Learning Centers, Lindamood-Bell School Partnerships provide research and validated literacy solutions and professional development for teachers, schools and districts, and are successful with turnaround/transformation and race to the top initiatives.

“With 50 learning centers in and beyond the United States, our continued growth includes research collaborations with MIT, UAB, Wake Forest and Georgetown University, as well as recognition from the U.S. Department of Education, Newsweek, Time, US News and World Report, Neuron, NeuroImage, CNN and PBS,” stated the website.