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We finally got around to recording a demo of using Learn by Rainbow to practice typing and spelling. My daughter, age 10, kindly offered to demonstrate using her spelling list from last week. Apologies for the shaky camera, I couldn’t find the tripod.

Try the typing flashcards for yourself at LearnByRainbow.com.

Planned demos:

• How to create your own word lists.
• Available user settings and what they do/mean.
• How to create word lists with images (maybe, lol, they are hard…).

I’m rolling out some big visual changes today.

• User editor, assignment editor, and typing practice now each open as modal popup graphics. This should prevent unexpected behavior when you try to edit multiple things at once, and reduce visual clutter.
• Items resize and center themselves better. (If assignments still take up too much space, try reloading them for the size updates using the browse button.)
• When you type a letter combination that makes a special sound, in addition to getting the alternate sound (if you have letter sounds turned on), you will see text float up the screen saying what kind of letter combination it was. You may see:
  • r-control for AR, OR, ER, IR, UR, or EAR
  • digraph for SH, TH, CH, etc
  • welded for certain sounds like WOR, or AL where both sounds are present but the combination causes the sounds to shift
  • classical for letter combinations from Greek or Latin, such as CHR or CHL that cause the CH to say /k/.
• There is now a status bar with clouds and a sun so you can see how far through the assignment you are.

I have high hopes of creating some video tutorials this weekend as well.

-Mary

I’ve done a little debugging and work on the assignment editor.

Debugging:

• Previously the latest assignments and users showed at the bottom of each list and the oldest was selected by default when you came back to the page. These have been reversed and hopefully this will be more intuitive.
• Previously after completing an assignment and returning to the main page, you’d still sometimes hear assignment prompts read or keys pressed, like the assignment was being practiced, even though you couldn’t see it. I think this is fixed now.

Assignment Editor:

• I’ve made the text on the checkboxes shorter and moved them to spots I think are logical, generally above the control where you enter the data they relate to.
• I’ve added a phonetic answer and phonetic prompt area. These allow you to enter an alternate version of the answer to override the text-to-speech in the cases where it doesn’t read the word correctly. I wanted this for the word “aa”, as in the type of lava, but the text-to-speech pronounces the letter names, like it was the acronym for Alcoholics Anonymous. By entering the phonetic answer as “ah ah,” the text-to-speech pronounces it correctly. Phonetic prompt allows you to override the prompt text-to-speech in the same way. Leave these blank if you don’t need them.
• When previewing just one at a time, the preview now shows on the right-hand side in a fixed position so it never scrolls of the screen.
• If you want, you can embed a YouTube video in your assignment. Navigate to the video on YouTube, select the Share button, and then embed. Copy the code it gives you into the prompt. Make sure to uncheck “Speak prompt” as it would read all that code back to you!

It’s been a difficult last couple weeks for me. My baby just started daycare for the first time, and has already had a couple colds after barely ever being sick in his life. Everyone else in the house has been sick and exhausted too. And that’s not even to get into the other things in this world getting me down. If you are using Learn By Rainbow Typing Flashcards to help you study, I’d love to hear from you to know I’m not wasting my time with it. Leave me a comment telling me how you are using it or what feature(s) you’d like to me to work on next.

-Mary

My latest update, at Gwen’s request, is an option to have the keyboard speak sounds as you type. You will find this setting in the user editor (click Edit next to your name or “Player One”). The setting is “Speak Letter Sounds”.

You probably only want to use “Speak Letter Sounds” when practicing English words. For the most part, each letter (or phonogram) makes its most common sound when you type it. doesn’t work well with vowels saying their long sounds at the end of a syllable or word, or before a silent E.

It knows common phonograms, so if you type two letters that go together quickly enough, you will hear the sound they make correctly rather than separate sounds. In other words, when you type SH you will hear the sound file for /sh/ instead of /s/ and /h/. Eventually I plan to add some sort of celebratory graphic or sound when you successfully type a phonogram quickly. This encourages typing each sound as a unit even when they are made up of multiple keystrokes. I included common welded sounds such as WOR saying /wer/ and ALK saying /auk/. You will hear C and G soften before an E, I, or Y as well.

Do you know what phonemic awareness is? It is awareness of how words break down into sounds. This is not just the conceptual understand, but also the ability to actually hear and manipulate those sounds within words.

Many children develop phonemic awareness skills naturally during the preschool and elementary school years, but for some–especially dyslexics–it can be very difficult to break words into sounds and put them back together. When this is very effortful, it makes it difficult and slow to sound out words. Then even once the word is decoded, the student may be less likely to recognize the word when it is encountered again.

Colorful sound blocks are one way to practice these skills. While practicing with physical manipulatives is generally preferable to screen-based manipulatives, sometimes a digital version is more convenient, so I made one.

Basic Sound Tiles

Here are a couple links to videos (not mine) on how to use these sound blocks.

I’m working on re-writing the digital flashcard program I used in high school for the web so you can use it to learn to type while also learning to spell. This is a work-in-progress and I encourage you to try it out and let me know how it works (or doesn’t) for you, and how I can improve upon it.