Our EAST project is an app called MyReadingPal. This project is being put together by David Ronnel and Gary Hartzell. We think that this project will bring the next generation of projects to the Pulaski Heights Middle School EAST and literacy programs. We also hope to get the app to other schools, not just Pulaski Heights Middle School. We hope we can get the app not only on Android devices but also Apple products and maybe a website. All of us on the project expect great things with it and cannot wait to see how far it goes.
One of the amazing features our app will have is a barcode scanner. The barcode scanner will let students get the information they need about a book, whether it is the author's name or the amount of pages in it. The barcode scanner is one of the more complex features of the MyReadingPal app. With some helpful tutorials, the barcode scanner is up and running! Another one of the wonderful features we have on our MyReadingPal app is the page logger. The page logger will help students keep track of how many pages they are reading. The page logger will be a whole different section on the app. The teacher can set due dates for how many pages the student must read in a certain amount of time.
Our community partner is the Pulaski Heights Middle School Parent Association. We have also had a little help from some of the Pulaski Heights Middle School English and literacy teachers. In each and every EAST Initiative project the community partner is probably one of the most vital and reliable parts of a project. We think community partners can give great advice as well as teach you a thing or two about the what your project can really do.
We hope that our app, MyReadingPal, will help students get ahead in school, especially in the subjects of literacy and English. The goal of our project is to raise the literacy levels of every student at Pulaski Heights Middle School and hopefully spread it to other schools too! We are using MIT App Inventor to make the app and we want to make the MyReadingPal app available to Apple devices using Xcode!