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Many years back I have created, as part of my dissertation, software
programs to teach/learn word recognition and recall at the preschool level,
using computer graphics representation. Children loved to "play" with the
computer (with, of course, an adult by him/her as a facilitator). Since it
was a time that such institutes scarcely had any digital equipment, I had
to rent the computers for the experiments. When the man came to pick up the
computers, the kids started to cry, because "we have had so much fun
playing with the computers!" (they couldn't understand why they were
taken...). The results of using the computers were amazing, and it was also
a great deal especially for children with ADD/ADHD. At a relatively short
time children have learned to read and write quite a few new words (the
tests included words [very large, at least 72p], from a story telling
[simply color animated, with plenty of space, no dictionaries that were
always clickable at other "educational" software programs aimed at 4-year
olds!] that I created, and non-words. If a child failed to recognize the
words, he/she would have been directed to a training screen, or could have
gotten back to the story. Since I have written a few stories, the final
test included words from all of the stories as well as non-words. If not
created for research purposes, I recommend to create only one story in each
program). Unfortunately, my programs, created with Authorware Professional,
have become obsolete very soon after, and I couldn't have used them
further. Today there are many software programs that are very easy to use
to create your own educational programs, and if you work with preschoolers,
it would be fun for you and for them!

Good luck!

Dr. Dania Shapira, Israel/Boston




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