The Extensive Reading Foundation

Dear Chris,

I do agree with you exactly.

Lack of access to books and literature is a major issue but not the only issue plaguing students trying to learn languages be it English, Chinese or others. In class students have only a very limited time to listen to teachers reading out loud and neither do the teachers able to pay particular attention to each student's abililty to speak the language.

One of the ways to overcome this class limitation, is the use of ICT in Education...like projecting the e-learning contents.

ICT has been extensively used to overcome such problems. However the problem with today's technology especially for the rural schools have been the inabililty to reach them. Most efforts by all educationists have been trying to use rich men's tools (like CDs and broadband based flash contents) to reach the poor men. It would never work and hence the lack of progress in many such efforts in ICT in MASS Education. Even UNESCO's noble efforts of Education for All, is already reported to be facing this problem of reaching their target of EFA by 2015.

The answer to overcome such impossible problem today is to overcome the bandwidth problem and yet able to provide rural schools with voice enabled books and contents running even on low cost ULPCs. You can view our site at www.paperlesshomework.com . Another major benefits would be by using less papers among students of the world, we would be contributing to the global green efforts. Imagine if each child is to save 3 reams of paper.

We are doing such and are reaching out to all schools around the world. We provide all schools in the world free tools and contents (which include hundreds of voice activated ebooks for them to read). This would thus overcome many problems faced by children of the world facing shortage of books to read because of financial constrains.