The Phonics Patent

Even as we rolled out SpellingCity, teachers and literacy coaches asked us to provide the same flexible practice tools to focus not just on spelling but on recognizing and working with sounds.  They asked for help not just with the spelling of words but with learning phonics and building phonological skills.  So we decided to help students construct and decode words by working with the sounds and the letter blocks that represent them. 

The idea was simple: We wanted to treat words like “tooth” as three blocks of letters which correspond with the three sounds: T, OO, and TH. But, as we searched, we could NOT find a system which mapped the sounds in words to the way the words are spelled. At first, this seemed unbelievable. Surely, in some university or research center, somebody had created a mapping which connected all the common English words into their sounds and mapped those sounds to the letters used to spell the words.

We spoke to a lot of people which  confirmed our initial findings. This mapping did not exist. Dictionaries, for instance, routinely have a phonetic spelling of words using various systems for writing phonics. But none of the dictionaries mapped the sounds back to the actual spelling of the words. Nobody had ever done this.

Our vision came from watching endless tutors, teachers, and parents help students by pointing at a few letters in a word and having the student say the sounds that those letters created. We watched teachers help students read the sounds to decode the word and then blend them together to write them.  

So, we decided to create the VocabularySpellingCity Phonics system, a novel contribution to literacy. The phonics system can be used for building a variety of prereading phonics-related skills including phonological skills, phonemic awareness, and spelling skills. Since we knew we had created something original and valuable, we started talking to lawyers. We decided in 2015 to file for a patent on our original system.  We started with two provisional patent filings.

Our permanent patent is number 10,387,543, issued on August 20th, 2019. It’s called a “Phoneme-to-Grap

Click for simple demo

hemes Mapping Patent”. It’s a utility patent covering our original method for algorithmically mapping the sounds in English words to the letters. The patent grant is both a recognition of novelty, a recognition of usefulness, and a grant of intellectual property ownership.

What is Phoneme to Grapheme Mapping?

Phonemes are the basic sounds of the English language.  Examples of phonemes from the word “cheek”, would be: CH, EE, K.   

Graphemes are the use of letters to express these sounds.  In English, here are three different patterns of how sounds (phonemes) are expressed by letters (graphemes):

1. Some sounds are created by a single letter, for example, the T is “ten”.  T almost always sounds the same (unless it’s in a combination with another letter like H).
2. Some sounds such as the long E sound can be spelled a number of ways including a double E, an E followed by an A, an E followed by a consonant followed by an E which is at the end of a word, a y at the end of the word, and an EY at the end of the word.
3. Some letters, like the S, can usually sound one way, like in sound, and sometimes sounds quite different, like in sugar (where it makes the SH sound)

So how can this technology help?

Students can hear and see the sounds by mousing over the sounds in each box of VocabularySpellingCity’s Interactive Phonics Boxes. Many classrooms have students first work on recognizing the initial sounds where the Sounds Boxes are used with images to match initial sounds.

The patent holders who are current VocabularySpellingCity employees are John Edelson, Obiora Obinyeluaku. and Kris Craig.  For commercial purposes, the patent belongs to VocabularySpellingCity.

Holders of Patent 10,387,543 (current employees)

Activities with Interactive Sound Boxes (that use this technology): Sound It Out,  Initial Sound Speller, Final Sound Speller,  FlashCards, Word Study (available for logged-in students) and TeachMe More.

Sound-Based Activities for Phonological  and Phonics Skill Development:  Which Initial Sound?, Which Final Sound?, Initial Sound Speller, Final Sound Speller,  SillyBulls, Sound It Out, FlashCards, Word

Click to Hear the Sounds

Study and TeachMe More.

John Edelson at the US Patent Office

The Sound Counter Helps Students Focus on Distinguishing Sounds, Building Phonological Awareness

Blogs Remain Special

Even with the social media of today, there remains a need for education through long form posts. Look, Twitter and Instagram and even Facebook are great for seeing a flow of ideas and headlines but they aren't good with substantative content, this is why blogs continue to reign as the only way to have deep materials.

Admittedly, both Facebook an dLInked In have built a sort of onsite blog for articles. This sort of works. But each article is isolated and there's not a canon of work with tabs and themes the way that one can get on a blog.

Teachers often find the indepth info that makes a huge difference to them thru these blogs.
And blogs help with people finding people. Here's info on education for Jennifer eaton.

Tech is NOT transforming education...

I was just reading the Why Tech is not transforming Teaching and I feel that all of those thoughts and opinions are too mired in the details of school management to see the forest.  They are just seeing the trees.  A few points:

<sadly, this article is a work in progress. Want to help me finish researching and writing it? Comment here and I'll get back to you>

Almost every industry has been transformed by education with vast ongoing increases in productivity. Farming, manufacturing, retailing, communications, health care, and even government.  Education's slow movement has to do with some funny things about how schools are managed, not by any limitations of what technology is available.

While they might be right that tech has not transformed teaching, it has absolutely transformed learning. <Higher IQ, astonishing spatial reasoning and hand-eye coordination> and a flip side that kids can no longer read maps.

Technology has transformed the kids: the kids of today are wired quite differently.
Technology has transformed the skills that the kids need to succeed when they graduate. Need to be more entrepreneurial, higher lever skills, more tech skilled. The highly repetitive disciplined jobs of yesteryear which we use to train people for: GONE!

Big picture: I love the story of the big foundation study in the last year which did a broad state of education study and found that the students were .... <drum roll> .... very bored by school. From late elementary school through the end of high school, students across the spectrum and country reported school was dull and didn't feel relevant or important except for the credential.

The study followed up by looking at  the nation's so called innovative schools and found... the same thing!  They then took a closer look at the data and found a countertrend. In every school, including the conventional ones, there was a streak of high interest activities.  What were they?  Well, we all know the answer and its sort of amazing that this doesn't have a higher profile in our discussions about education.... It's the electives and supplementary programs.   The robotics program, the coding program, the theater program, the music program, the school newspaper, and of course, sports. 

So how to think about education and the impact of technology. 
Personalized:
- if you are black, do you care about a US history text book in which the first half of the book is all those white dudes and the only blacks are details about the start of slavery?   Why not ask them to create real US history which shows how they got here? Their history.  The research on this is that it produces highly motivated students plus much better mastery of US history as measured on conventional tests....