Blog, Web Changes, Book Recommendations and Distance Learning Courses – May 9, 2010 – Rants & Raves by Dyslexia Victoria Online

Hi, Howie deGraaf here.

By the time you read this,the old website should be gone and you can visit the new website. Karey Hope and I created the old site. It worked okay but we are not, in any way, website designers. Back in 2005 we figured the most efficient way to get people to learn about how we see the best way to approach Dyslexia Awareness and the best way to teach Dyslexics was to get onto the Internet. So we went online and got some advice and gave it a try. The old one worked but it was getting too complicated, the basis of it was formed by three people (Karey, Andrew DuToit, a programmer by trade, and myself).

The original co-founders of Dyslexia Victoria Online are Karey Hope and her mother Jan Turner. With three people designing that website, the focus of it was a little too broad. There were too many categories and it really was a little difficult to navigate. Last summer Jan officially retired due to a series of health issues. Since then Karey and I have made some significant changes to the website and the business. We are using the website less for teaching and more for communicating with people. We hope to use the website to help get people going in the right direction.

One of the newest products we offer is a pair of distance learning courses.“Course One – How the Right Brain Learns and Thinks” includes teaching aids, a study guide and workbook that teaches the individual how to understand Dyslexia as a Learning Difference and how to teach to it. The next course “Course Two – How to Assess and Evaluate the Dyslexic Student” includes instructions on how to assess for Dyslexic issues, and by using the instructions, how teach to these issues.

By the end of this year we should also have re-written the original books as well. The information in the books is going to be the same but we are adding many new concepts and teaching strategies. We are also making some formatting changes. Some of the language will be updated and we have found lots of images we want to put into them as well to demonstrate the teaching methods. We discovered the effectiveness of these images as we began to put more of them into our assessment reports, presentations and workshops.

Our assessments have been going extremely well and very soon, perhaps in a month, there will a new testimonial section on the website with comments from the parents of the children we have created specialized teaching programs for.

One parent recently mentioned summer is rapidly approaching and she thought we should prepare for it by creating something special for parents who are helping children get ready for the new school year during the summer break. We hadn’t thought about the summer months as being any different from the rest of the year but really the summer can be a terrific opportunity for children to prepare for the upcoming school year. This parent said that most of the recommendations, that are the basis for the specialized teaching programs we make for the student, are actually just little bits of practice of specific skills but done on a consistent basis. With that in mind Karey and I have made a couple of special offers for parents for the summer. The assessments are going to include a couple of our books as well as some practice exercises that can be done completely independently from school work. I am offering sales on our books as well.

To help you learn more about our theory and perception of Dyslexia we are offering a 2 for 1 sale on two of our E-books from May 15th till the end of the summer: “Dyslexia or Being Right Brained” and is a great to use as a primer guide on how we handle teaching to Dyslexia. Largely it explains why we don’t consider Dyslexia as a Learning Disability but rather simply a Learning Difference. The second book“Teaching the Dyslexic Student: Spelling and Reading” discusses Dyslexia Spelling and Language Arts issues and teaching strategies including why understanding Learning Styles is especially important when teaching a Dyslexic individual. It also contains the “The Spelling Notebook” which is a tool for helping Dyslexic students record spelling words they are having difficulty with. One of the big changes we are making to this book, in the reformatting later this year, is the addition of “The Fourteen Steps to Teaching Dyslexics to Spell and Reading”. This mini manual has been extremely successful in helping Dyslexic students with spelling and reading. Parents and teachers have been contacting us to say that the results of using these teaching strategies have been rapid, often with results in less that a week. To anyone ordering the e-book “Teaching the Dyslexic Student: Spelling and Reading” we will include the download of the “The Fourteen Steps to Teaching Dyslexics to Spell and Read”.

So if you are thinking about helping your Dyslexic child get a head start on the next school year perhaps starting by using the two books I have mentioned would be a part of that plan.

Order both books today with our summer program!