December 17, 2021
Refugee children play the Feed the Monster Arabic literacy app, sourced through the EduApp4Syria competition. Photo credit: Norad.
On December 18 every year, UNESCO celebrates World Arabic Language Day–one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, used daily by more than 400 million people. We’re taking the opportunity to highlight Arabic tools and resources created by our innovators to improve reading outcomes for children in low-resource contexts, including the more than 4 million refugee children worldwide and the over 1.5 billion whose education was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
ACR GCD, a leader in EdTech for literacy, has implemented and scaled game-changing solutions and tools to increase literacy. While not a replacement for traditional education, EdTech can serve as an effective supplement to traditional learning and can positively influence the learning of children who lack access to school. Below are some of those tools:
- 100 STEM books created by Asafeer Education Technologies, which are all all open source and can be contextualized to other languages). A training developed by author Maria Dadouch leveraged these books to engage more than 34,000 new authors across the Middle East. Watch a video about the books! You can find these and additional free books in Arabic on Asafeer’s library and mobile app, Bloom and the Global Digital Library.
- A series of literacy learning smartphone apps to improve reading outcomes for Syrian refugee children, like Feed the Monster and Antura and the Letters. Feed the Monster, originally created in English and Arabic, is now available in 50 languages! Watch a video with Arabic subtitles about the games and another about how the games improve the psychosocial well-being and learning (also with Arabic subtitles). Read a report assessing the impact of these and other literacy learning games for Syrian Refugee children in Arabic and English.
- A project to create assistive software to easily create and publish Moroccan Sign Language-supported educational materials for students who are deaf.
Help us raise awareness of these tools and other opportunities to implement EdTech solutions to improve reading outcomes for marginalized children in low-resource contexts. Share these tools with your networks!
