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IBM's corporate citizenship
activities used to be separate from its business functions.
Now, we treat our grant partners in the same way we treat our
best business customers, working closely with them to develop
new technologies that are solving serious social problems. |
Stanley S. Litow
VP Corporate Community Relations and President, IBM International
Foundation |
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| IBM |
IBM, the world's largest information
technology company, has developed new technology through its
Reinventing Education initiative that is driving successful
school reform programs involving thousands of teachers and
millions of students. One of its Reinventing Education grant
partners is the Houston Independent School District, where
evaluators found that Watch-Me!-Read technology developed
through the IBM program is improving the reading and comprehension
skills of youngsters in the district.
Researched and developed through an earlier Reinventing Education
grant with the School District of Philadelphia, the software
program was implemented in Houston and is now included in
every first-grade class in the district. Watch-Me!-Read assists
teachers working with children who learn at varying speeds
and levels, including youngsters from disadvantaged backgrounds
and those with language barriers or learning disabilities.
In collaboration with teachers and administrators in Houston,
IBM researchers and engineers designed cutting-edge interactive
speech recognition technology that is capable of listening
to a child read aloud, recognizing mistakes, and asking the
child to repeat words they misread. The program will also
read the words correctly, if necessary. To build the application,
IBM researchers traveled throughout the United States to record
the voices of 1,800 children, capturing the variety of intonation
and accents that would enable the program to communicate with
youngsters from a wide range of backgrounds. The technology
was later adapted for use with adult immigrants in adult learning
programs.
Don Johnson Company, an IBM business partner specializing
in software for students and adults with disabilities, is
now marketing Watch-Me!-Read to educators around the country.
“Like all Reinventing Education sites, Houston became
an innovative laboratory where IBM's best thinkers worked
side-by-side with staff from the school district,” said
IBM's Stan Litow. “The result of this philanthropic
effort is a valuable new teaching resource that can be used
by schools everywhere.”
For more information, contact Donna Mattoon at IBM at (518) 487-6603 or
at mattoond@us.ibm.com
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