I had the opportunity to sit down with Mark Williams from Modality Learning and discuss a product his company has been working on called Raybook.
Now the tag line for Modality is “Making Small Screens Smarter”. The concept is simple enough, work with publishers to adapt their content to a small screen much like iTunes has adapted music to an mp3 player. We know where we are now with the iPod and other players. I know of schools, Durham Academy included that has purchased iPods with the Belkin Tune Talk to record podcasts for publishing on the Internet. We hoped to perhaps create audio books by having a parent narrate a book we own or even work with Audible to load content onto the iPods. Both of these methods could work, but the issue was one was just an input device for recording while the other had the issue of getting just the right content onto the device.

Now comes Raybook with titles from Brain Quest, CliffNotes, and other publishers. Now we have content that we can download onto the device that is appropriate for young learners. Doesn’t every student need to learn the multiplication tables, spelling of life time words, geography facts, math facts, history facts to only mention a few. What would happen if the fact learning was done with an iPod while coming to school, at a friends house, or at a center in the classroom? Imagine that the teacher could have the student take a quiz using the same questions from the iPod content. This is possible and could be done if Modality Learning keeps working on their products. I hope to have the LS Digikids test their products to see if we should work with the company.

In the interest of full disclosure Mark Williams is a parent and husband of a colleague and students here at Durham Academy. In addition, the company is just down the street right here in Durham so this is a no brainer as far as I am concerned.

To find out how Raybook works, check out how it works. It reminds me of Look Up Above ” Is it a plane, is it a bird… No it is super learning….

Ok, so I am not a marketing genius but I think this is a company and product to watch as schools purchase these little devices or students purchase them and bring them to school. What if instead of banning them, we added content to it?