SynPhony Features
Check out these pages for details on additional features.
Assessment Features
The Assessment page is available when you have turned on the Tracking Students option in the Settings. Here you can perform a number of basic assessments to see if a student is progressing in their literacy acquisition. The program keeps track of some of the assessments and displays charts to show the progress.
The Control Panel contains the buttons to access the various assessments.
Letter sounds
This assessment produces a page with all of the sounds (phonemes) in the language. The purpose is to test the student to see if they know the sound (or the name) of each letter or multigraph. If the person doing the assessment determines that the student knows it, they can click on it and the letter square turns green. This also stores the letter in the program so that when you go to another page all of the known letters are selected already. So this is a fast way to find out which letters you can begin with for a student who may know only some letters and probably in a different order than the one which SynPhony provides.
There are two controls for testing the Letter sounds: “Store correct letters” and “Display keywords”. If you wish to display a key word for each letter you can do so by selecting the “Display keywords” button. When you have completed the assessment clicking on the “Store correct letters” button will store the correct letters as “known letters” in the system.
The letter sounds assessment looks like this:
High Frequency words
The High frequency words assessment could also be named “Sight Words” assessment. This option lets you display the most frequently occuring words in the database for an assessment.
The controls for this assessment let you change the number of columns and change the font size. You can choose how many words to display. When a SynPhony database is created it counts how frequently each word occurs in the texts on which it is based on. This option lets you choose from the top 20-200 most frequently occuring words. You can also copy the words to the clipboard to use in another program such as a word processor or spreadsheet. You can also use these high frequency words to perform a reading test to collect any incorrectly read words for later review. Finally, you can also perform a timed reading test with these words.
Custom Word list
The custom word list activity lets you supply your own list of words or a story. Just paste them into the text box provided. You can change the font size as well as the number of columns to display the words. You can copy the words to the clipboard for use in another program. You can also perform a reading test and a timed reading test on this custom word list.
Review words
This option will retrieve the words that have been stored in the system at various places in the program using the ”Reading test” feature. In the graphic below there are 4 words which the user has tagged during a reading test which the student read incorrectly. The first time a word is added the battery icon is empty and coloured red.
The way to use this feature is to get the student to read each word again (which they previously had trouble reading correctly). Each time the word is read correctly, the tutor can click on the word and the battery icon beside each word gets filled up and changes colour. The goal is to fill up the battery completely full (5 clicks) and then the word will disappear from the list.
This gets the student to re-read words which have given them problems several times to practise words. You can intersperse the re-reading in between other activities to prevent a memory effect. The goal is to remove all of the words from the Review activity.