FrontRead helps the youth in Tønder preparing for the future

Last year, the school Overbygningsskolen in Tønder was offered FrontRead, because Tønder Municipality purchased licenses for every school in the municipality.

Tønder Municipality contacted Frontread and decided to try the app for a year after hearing about the program and the possibilities linked to it. Very quickly feedback came in from the teachers about the positive results they achieved and it was decided to expand the test to include younger classes too.

Hanne Bonde, teacher at the Ressourcenter Slusen and the Puls-line, which is part of Overbygningsskolen in Tønder, together with Helle Behr, coordinator at Ressourcecenter Slusen, is the one charged with rolling out the program in Overbygningsskolen.  To them it is a question about preparing their students on a life after school.

“We constantly demand more and more from young people continuing their education, so we have to prepare them properly, so they are able to manage the amount of reading required,” Helle Behr said in an interview with Tønder Ugeavis.

Individual goals for reading

FrontRead is not meant to be a replacement for other reading tools. Nor is it a tool for the individual student to use on a daily basis. Instead, it is a series of exercises created with the intent of helping the student push themselves in order to improve their abilities.

”You don’t need to comprehend every word to get the gist of a text,” Hanne Bonde said. “In fact, it is enough to understand about 60-80% of the text to get the information you need out of it. It is the individual techniques the student is exposed to, that helps them become a faster reader.”

FrontRead is designed to take the students individual reading speed into consideration. This way the weaker students won’t fall behind, just as the stronger students won’t feel that the reading material lacks a challenge for them.

“What happens it that the student sits and reads a text that scrolls fairly quickly across the screen. Afterwards, they need to answer questions about that text and based on that the teacher can regulate the speed of the exercises so it correlates to the students individual reading speed,” Helle Behr said.

”The point isn’t to make all the students equally good – but to make them as good as each of them can become individually,” Hanne Bonde remarked.