Innovative Designer

ISTE Standard for Students 4

Students use a variety of technologies within a design process to identify and solve problems by creating new, useful or imaginative solutions.

  • 4a: Students know and use a deliberate design process for generating ideas, testing theories, creating innovative artifacts, or solving authentic problems.

  • 4b: Students select and use digital tools to plan and manage a design process that considers design constraints and calculated risks.

  • 4c: Students develop, test, and refine prototypes as part of a cyclical design process.

  • 4d: Students exhibit a tolerance for ambiguity, perseverance, and the capacity to work with open-ended problems.

ISTE Standard for Educators 2

  • 2b: Advocate for equitable access to educational technology, digital content, and learning opportunities to meet the diverse needs of all students.

ISTE Standard for Educators 5

  • 5a: Use technology to create, adapt, and personalize learning experiences that foster independent learning and accommodate learner differences and needs.

Tool demonstrated: Simple English Wikipedia & Text-To-Speech / Google Translate

What is the Simple English Wikipedia and how can it be used with TTS readers and Google Translate? Listen up, you’re about to learn!

The Simple English Wikipedia is a fantastic resource for all types of students ranging from confident and capable academic English speakers to emerging English Language Learners. The Wiki was born out of a desire to make encyclopedic knowledge more accessible to a wider audience. While the “standard” English Wikipedia can sometimes be incredibly daunting to read—using hyper-specific language and throwing massive text block after text block at a reader—the Simple English Wiki slims down the text while abiding by a strict standard of readability and access that extends to all articles hosted on the site.

While fewer articles exist in Simple English than exist in “standard” English, there is a veritable plethora of information waiting to be discovered by students who may not have felt comfortable researching or working in as hostile an environment as Wikipedia can seem. Alongside the simplified language, readers who learn better through listening instead of reading are able to use Text-To-Speech (TTS) readers, such as one built into most computers, to have their computer read the simplified language out to them. Google Translate can also be used by English Language Learners to translate the text into any language of their choosing. They can even listen to a TTS reading in the language they have just translated it into!

Want to see this combination of simplified English and TTS readers in action? Click the embedded player below to check out a screencast I created walking through accessing and using the Simple English Wiki. Want to read my process reflection instead? Just keep scrolling!

Reflection:

In a nutshell: the Simple English Wiki, combined with TTS readers and Google Translate, is a powerful tool to engage students in research using Wikipedia when use of the “standard” English Wiki on its lonesome is actively hostile.

When I first discovered the Simple English Wikipedia in my Sophomore year of high school, I can vividly remember wondering why in the world no one had bothered to tell me about it before. I was researching various environmental disasters in Haiti and the sociopolitical ramifications of said disasters when I first realized I could type “simple.wikipedia.com” into the search bar in front of any term and instantly understand three times as much about any given topic. I evangelized about it to my friends, most of which had never heard about it before either. We actively wondered why the simplified language option wasn’t accessible from the main landing page of Wikipedia. Was it because they were aware the reputation their service had in schools, opting to repair their standing within the educational community by emphasizing flowery language? Was there a nefarious council of Wikipedia Elders shunning accessibility features? Or was it simply that not enough people knew about the alternate Wiki to translate enough articles into simplified English?

Spoiler alert: it’s probably the third option. Accessibility options like the Simple English Wikipedia suffer from a vicious cycle of inattention: not enough people know about it, not enough articles are written or maintained, not enough visibility is given to the Wiki, not enough people know about it, on, and on, and on. At this point the Simple English Wiki has thousands upon thousands of articles written in a more accessible style, and yet the Wiki is still a secret in academia. As I said—I’ve gotten a lot of use out of this tool, and I am a learner who retains knowledge fairly well through reading. As an adept English speaker, reading and internalizing the words on the web page worked well enough without extra accessibility features.

This will not be the case for every student in the classroom. From English Language Learners to native speakers who simply aren’t confident in their language skills, from adept writers to struggling ones, many students simply learn better through hearing spoken language. This is where TTS readers come in: they read out text! I’ve seen how beneficial TTS readers can be through my time in undergrad. One of my colleagues in the English department used a text reader in most tests and finals we had together; he would sit near the back of the room with a school-supplied laptop, headphones in, paying close attention to each individual phoneme that was said. “Reading just causes me to get distracted,” he told me one time outside of class when we were talking about accessibility accommodations. “I can… hear it, you know?” he said with a laugh.

As educators, it’s our responsibility to introduce our students to as many technological scaffolds as we can. Student-led inquiry on the Simple English Wikipedia with the assistance of TTS readers and translation supports for English Language Learners meets ISTE Standard 4 for Students and standard 2 and 5 for UDL and equitable access. These programs, used together, act as a boon to all types of learners in the learning community and should be emphasized whenever inquiry-based projects are on the horizon.