GLEN World: A look back at 2023
As we head into the holiday season, we are excited to share with you our progress in helping children learn to read and get ready for school.
Blog
Learner Stories: GLEN Learn in a TK Classroom
Dear friend of GLEN World, A unique feature of the GLEN Learn platform is the learner analytics that we gather. These analytics tell us a lot about our young learners’ engagement, progress, and the challenges along their learning journey, and enable us to improve our content to help them better. For example: how long did …
GLEN World: A look back at 2022
Dear friend of GLEN World, Our very best wishes to you and your loved ones as we head into the holiday season. This is a time to reflect on all that we have accomplished in terms of helping children take the first steps towards literacy and school readiness. Regarding our work here at home in …
GLEN World Newsletter Spring 2022
Dear friend of GLEN World, The challenges posed by these Covid-19 years have inspired us at GLEN World to work harder than ever to help children take their first steps towards literacy and school readiness. With spring in full swing, and the pandemic hopefully entering its final phase, we are taking a moment to reflect …
GLEN World: A look back at 2021
Dear friend of GLEN World, Hope you are staying healthy and safe. Our very best wishes to you and your loved ones as we head into the holiday season. It’s been another difficult year for everyone as the Covid-19 pandemic drags on. Here at GLEN World, we are taking a moment to reflect on all …
GLEN Learn mobile app (iOS and Android) now available: helping children jump the digital divide
The GLEN (GLobal ENglish) World team is excited to announce the public release of GLEN Learn, our app for early English literacy and school readiness, as an iOS app and as an Android app. The GLEN Learn app guides children through the building blocks of early English literacy and is aligned with research-based standards for …
GLEN World welcomes two new board members: Donna Barranco Fisher and Michael Furlong
GLEN (GLobal ENglish) World is excited to announce that Donna Barranco Fisher and Prof. Emeritus Mike Furlong have joined our board to help us take the next step in our journey. Donna and Mike are joining our board at a pivotal moment. We are embarking on a multi-year strategic plan focusing on school readiness for …
GLEN World welcomes two new board members: Donna Barranco Fisher and Michael Furlong Read More »
GLEN Learn aligned with standardized school-readiness assessments
We are excited to share that the learning content in GLEN Learn, GLEN World’s flagship learning app for young English Learners, is now closely aligned with two research-backed school readiness assessments, the Kindergarten Student Entrance Profile (KSEP) and the Desired Results Developmental Profile (DRDP). KSEP and DRDP are used in school districts in California to …
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GLEN World: A look back at 2020
Dear friends of GLEN World, Hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy. What a year this has been! As the scope of the pandemic started becoming clear early this year, we decided to double down on our efforts to make our learning content globally accessible to children stuck at homes everywhere. As …
What we learned from GLEN Learn’s pilot deployment at IVYP in Goleta, California
Our flagship learning app, GLEN Learn, was piloted at the Isla Vista Youth Project (IVYP) Children’s Center in Goleta, California from November 2019 to March 2020. IVYP serves a large fraction of families with English Learners (ELs) in Santa Barbara, California, and has decades of experience providing a diverse set of educational and social programs …
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GLEN Books mobile app now available: beautifully illustrated and warmly narrated children’s stories in English and Spanish
We are excited to announce the public release of our GLEN Books app: available for free as an Android app on the Google Play Store and an iOS app on the Apple App Store! GLEN Books features a collection of illustrated children’s storybooks in English and Spanish, narrated (by our expert storytellers!) with synchronized text-highlight …
GLEN Learn: From Language Acquisition Principles to Digital Content
While we are charting exciting new research territory with our goal of enabling “zero to reading” with minimal skilled supervision, our efforts are firmly grounded in decades of research in language learning and sociocultural psychology. Our team includes well-established ISLA and dual language learner education researchers from UC Santa Barbara and Carnegie Mellon University — …
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GLEN World: A look back at 2019
Dear friends of GLEN World, Season’s greetings! As the holiday season gets under way, we thought it is a good time to share with you the progress that GLEN World has made in 2019, which has laid the groundwork for an exciting 2020. Our journey to helping bridge the literacy divide continues apace…here are a …
GLEN World’s Learner Analytics Dashboard for Deployment and Research Partners
A key advantage of digital learning is that we can use the data collected during the process of learning, not just to drive personalized adaptation of the learning content presented to the child in a given moment, but also to derive learning analytics for individuals and groups that can be used for longer-term understanding and …
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Partnership with IVYP and content deployment pilot kickoff!
We are excited to announce our partnership with Isla Vista Youth Projects (IVYP), a grassroots organization in Goleta, California with decades of experience in providing a diversity of educational and social programs for children in the community regardless of income. The passion and commitment of the IVYP team, their deep roots in the community, and …
Partnership with IVYP and content deployment pilot kickoff! Read More »
What we learned from our early pilots
Our early pilots in California and India have been critical in shaping our dev plan, while also indicating that there is a strong “product-market” fit between our vision and the reality that many children are struggling with. Santa Barbara, CA While our current content emphasizes guided learning, we had started with a free-choice format in …
GLEN Learn: A Guided Lesson Plan
Our flagship app, GLEN Learn, is structured as a set of lessons aimed at guiding a child from “zero to reading,” with heavy use of imagery and audio to create an immersive environment for literacy. The first step in this process is vocabulary acquisition. Once a child knows about 90% of the words in a …
“Zero to reading”? What? How?
“Zero” means that we do not assume prior exposure to English, or indeed, to any other language. “Zero to reading” means guiding a child from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” There is a significant research literature on “Instructed Second Language Acquisition,” or more simply, how to teach languages. This literature tells us that …
GLEN World: An Introduction
In today’s globalized world, proficiency in English is the key to educational and economic opportunity. Our mission at GLEN (GLobal ENglish) World is to scale English literacy to unlock these opportunities for every child. The need for scaling is clear. Even in an English speaking country like the United States, a significant percentage of schoolchildren …