SINGAPORE, Nov. 5, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The fourth annual EduTECH Asia 2019 was organized in Singapore from Nov, 4th to 7th. Being the largest educational technology conference in the region, EduTECH Asia attracted hundreds of educational technology companies and education stakeholders every year. KaDa Story was invited to participate in this summit because of its leading position in the field of children's digital content in China. Sally Xie, the founder of KaDa Story, delivered a keynote speech on the topic of how to use preschool learning contents to inspire the next generation. She believed that audio-visual picture books are the optimal learning contents in order to facilitate children to be life-long readers.
94% of the information is conveyed through visual and audio integration; Reading is largely encouraged.
With the rapid development of Internet technology, this generation of children is referred to as the "digital natives", for their growing environment is loaded with digital contents and technologies. Suchomlinsky, the former Soviet Union educator, once noted that children's intellectual development is dependent on the level of their reading abilities. It has been a hot-issue for both the educators and parents on the topic of how to provoke the reading interest of the digital natives and facilitate them with reading skills.
The essence of reading skills is the ability to acquire, comprehend and apply information. Treicher, the experimental psychologist, conducted two famous experiments on the source of information that people can retrieve from. After analyzing large amounts of research data, he found out that 83% of the information acquired by humans is stimulated through visual sensory and 11% of that is through hearing sensory. With an audio-visual integrated content, people may get 94% of the information simultaneously.
As digital natives, children nowadays are more accustomed to digital contents. Audio-visual picture books not only can be used as multi-sensory stimulators, they are also in accordance with children's image-learning patterns. During the process of reading picture books, listening to the audios, flipping pages, repeated reading, and reflecting on the content, children are better immersed in the story and highly motivated in reading.
Active reading is the key to foster reading habits
How can we foster our kids to become highly effective life-long readers? In order to answer this question, we ought to be familiar with children's cognitive development. Interests and the sense of self-efficacy play a pivotal role in the learning process for preschoolers. Whether interests can be solidified into learning habits will influence whether they view reading as a task or an inseparable part of life, which also determines if they will treat reading as a life-long joy or not.
It is known that KaDa Story is utilizing an independent-developed algorithm for individualized recommendation. Children's reading behaviors and preferences are analyzed through big data processing and Smart recommendation models, so that every child is reading within an "individualized portable library", where they can find matching contents from more than 20,000 stories on the platform. "We want our children to have the autonomy of choosing what they want to read. We understand and respect each child's personality and preference. There's nothing more than active and initiative reading that we would like to see more from them," Sally mentioned. The sense of achievement is generated from reading comprehensible and intriguing contents, and in return this feeling will motivate children to continue reading. They will gradually develop independent reading abilities and move from the stage of shared and guided picture-book reading, with the accumulation of the depth and broadness of reading contents.
Collaborative activities, such as playing and interacting among peers, have a strong influence on the learning process of preschoolers. KaDa Story periodically initiates "reading challenges" with gamification elements of badges and points on the platform. This kind of activities attracts hundreds of thousands of children to participate and foster their active reading habits by adding more fun to the reading experience, and offer them a large platform to demonstrate their abilities.
Good stories should be integrated into children's lives and accompany them along the way of growing up, so that it will be enlightening and inspiring them in a subtle way. "KaDa Story insists on bring the best reading contents to our children and foster their reading skills and habits, so that they will more likely to be lifelong readers and constantly retrieve and regain their strengths from the books," Sally shared at the end of the keynote speech.
SOURCE KaDa Story
