What is Learning Ally?       

Learning Ally is a national non-profit organization dedicated to helping students who have challenges with reading print.  Many children who have reading challenges need additional assistance so that they don’t have to needlessly struggle in school.

FRSD has a subscription to Learning Ally, which provides a library of 80,000 audiobooks.  Your child has access to this library for FREE!  These audiobooks are human-narrated and can be operated on an electronic device, such as a Chromebook.  While your child listens to the audiobook, he or she can follow the text on the Chromebook.

I will help your child learn how to access an audiobook to read.  Some of the students used Learning Ally last year, if they were in Literacy Support, and just need to have their account updated.

According to cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia:

“So listening to an audiobook is not ‘cheating,’ but let me tell you why I objected to phrasing the question that way.  ‘Cheating’ implies an unfair advantage, as though you are receiving a benefit while skirting some work.  Why talk about reading as though it were work?”

He continues, “Listening to an audiobook might be considered cheating if the act of decoding were the point; audio books allow you to seem to have decoded without doing so.  But if appreciating the language and the story is the point, it’s not.  Comparing audio books to cheating is like meeting a friend at Disneyland and saying: ‘You took a bus here?  I drove myself, you big cheater.’  The point is getting to and enjoying the destination.  The point is not how you traveled.”