Dear friend of GLEN World,
As we head into the holidays and start looking towards 2024, it is an opportunity to reflect on our progress and why we do what we do. The answer is simple: the future belongs to our children, and our role as a society is to make sure they get the best possible start in life. Our GLEN World team aims to play our small part in this through our efforts in early literacy.
Change begins at home. Here at home in Santa Barbara County, California, we are working with early childhood education partners such as First 5 Santa Barbara County to define the most effective set of interventions using GLEN Learn, building on our learnings from our pilot from the Transitional Kindergarten (TK) at Lompoc Unified School District. We are thankful to board members Donna Barranco Fisher and Michael Furlong for their active contributions to these efforts.
We have already reported on aspects of our LUSD pilot in earlier newsletters, but there is some new news as well. We now have the school readiness scores based on a KSEP (Kindergarten Student Entrance Profile) assessment of the children in the TK pilot who entered Kindergarten in LUSD. Compared with the overall Kindergarten cohort, the school readiness scores for children in the pilot are significantly better. While it is difficult to tease apart the impact of the overall TK experience on school readiness from that of the use of GLEN Learn in the classroom, it is still very encouraging to note the higher KSEP scores of our learner cohort.
Organic usage of the GLEN Learn app continues worldwide thanks to the continued support of our Google Ads grant, with the most impact in Asia, Africa, and South America. Our learner analytics indicate that our GLEN Learn and GLEN Books apps have helped more than 56K young learners worldwide who have completed more than 650K learning activities and collectively read more than 220K stories! While we are encouraged by the organic usage, we continue to reach out to existing and new community partners to best help our young learners get ready for school – via systematic and consistent engagement with our content in preschools, early learning centers, and in-home settings.
On the app development front, based on feedback from our learners and deployment partners, we have fine-tuned GLEN Learn to enhance several aspects of the app for better learner engagement and learning efficacy. Especially notable is the improved experience for exercises including letter tracing, which used to be challenging for some younger children on Android devices. Based on feedback from our partners in India, we have also developed a version of the GLEN Learn app for personal computers (for both Windows and Mac operating systems) that works offline. This app is a private release that we share with our partners for their deployments; please reach out to us at info@glenworld.org if you would like to try it out at your institution.
Even a quick glance at the global news tells us that it is not an easy world that we are asking our children to step into. The least we can do is to arm every child with a quality education, but opportunity gaps in education open up well before children get to school. Join us in our efforts to close this gap! As you plan your gifts for your loved ones and causes this holiday season, please consider making a gift to help us help every child get ready for school.
From all of us at GLEN World and the children we serve, a huge THANK YOU to the bigger GLEN World family of donors, supporters, and partners. If you are not already part of our community, please consider joining us. Donate now.
Have a wonderful holiday season, and a great 2024!
The GLEN World Team
GLEN World is a 501(c)3 nonprofit. If your employer has a donation match program, then that’s a great way to double your gift’s impact!