New technologies can be challenging at first – but it’s definitely worth the ride. Kayany Foundation’s amazing schools are changing lives in refugee camps in Bekaa, Lebanon and English language teaching plays an important role in that. Join us and immerse yourself in this project about dreaming big, gaining confidence and never ever giving up on education, not even in the most extreme situations.

Kayany Foundation is a Lebanese non-governmental organization founded almost 10 years ago in response to the Syrian crisis. Kayany creates educational programs for Syrian refugee children and youth. Kayany took a leading role in bringing quality education to “out-of-school” refugees in Lebanon, giving them support to not stay behind in their studies and the chance of a future career. 

And their impact? They provide classes and mentoring to more than 3500 of the most marginalized Syrian refugee children and youth. 

It’s undeniable that the work they do is crucial and can alter the entire future of these children. To do so, Kayany needed the most dedicated educators, a great plan for methodology, and lots of resources and tools – preferably ones that support inclusion and can work with children of different ages, levels of knowledge, and backgrounds. That’s where BOOKR Class came into the picture.   

English classes are one of the main subjects they learn – but why is English important to these children? 

Working with what we most believe in, we embarked on a six-month-long journey to help Kayany implement and utilize the power of stories to make their English courses even more effective. Let’s start with the hard facts!

4 amazing, dedicated ESL teachers participated in the project, implementing BOOKR Class into their lesson plans with the continuous assistance of BOOKR’s Customer Success team. 

Overall, they involved 60 students during a 6 months-long period. We conducted interviews with them before and after starting out with BOOKR Class – aiming to understanding their needs and their struggles in order to better support them and measure results afterwards. 

They used the BOOKR Class library application in classroom activities, as a warmup exercise, and part of their project work as well. 

Qualitative interviews with the teachers at the end of the project provided us with interesting and oftentimes surprising insights.

Learning with a digital tool, being exposed to native narration, pronunciation and animated content that helps them understand the context was something new for the students.  

Kayany pupils showed a high level of engagement in the classes and were especially amazed by the variety of books they could choose from. 

According to Anas, one of the participating teachers, “the stories were like them” so they could easily relate to some of the books which boosted their interest even more. 

An exciting message we received from this project is the continuing demand of printable additional materials that we also offer. The strong marriage of traditional education and technology is undeniable – which is why we keep producing and uploading those extra materials on a daily basis. 

The app and the Teacher’s Dashboard is created with educators in mind. For a school like Kayany, the most important features that made their work easier and more effective were:

One of the main features that made using educational technology for Kayany possible was the Offline mode in the BOOKR Class Library App. If an educator suspects that the internet connection might not be strong enough at school, all they need to do is download the books they wish to use while still connected to wifi. Those books can be played anywhere, anytime. 

So many children in need in the world, but we are beyond touched that we got to positively influence the lives of some of them in Guatemala and Lebanon up until now – and we’re only getting started. We’ll continue trying to save the world one book at a time, the only way we know how: with the immense power of stories. 

What a special feeling: to witness your mission statement come to life, right before your eyes. To see your youngest clients thrive, to recognize the change that you mean to create with your product – that’s pretty much the dream of every startup, and that’s what we’ve been lucky enough to experience over the last 6 months.

We could elaborate for pages on how important it is to be able to speak a foreign language! English as a second language opens doors to opportunities beyond borders and allows children to make connections outside their country or culture. It can make a real difference. As a tech company in the educational sector, we carry the responsibility to aim for equity in language education and support underprivileged learners the best way we can: with the power of stories.

Many amazing and dedicated educators and social workers make sure that this need is met in these Children’s Villages, but their resources are limited. 

We wanted to provide a tool that will exponentially increase the children’s knowledge of the English language while helping them fall in love with reading as well. 

Collaborating with Aldeas Infantiles SOS in Guatemala, we planned a  6-month-long pilot project enabling children in the organization to try learning English with the BOOKR Class digital library application. (Due to national and school holidays, there have been 4,5 active months at the end.) 

Over a hundred little ones from ages 4-14 participated in the program with 10 tutors of Aldeas Infantiles. 

Even though BOOKR Class is a teaching and learning app designed specifically for ESL education / English teachers, thanks to the language variations in instructions and the intuitive UI, tutors who are not trained to teach English can also incorporate this tool into their activities. 

We did lay out the exact mission of this project more precisely before jumping in: the most important aim was to make English learning and reading a habit as stories and reading have a direct impact on children’s well-being and social development. 

Another key purpose was to test the effects of using context, stories, and songs to improve not only children’s language skills but soft and social-emotional skills as well.

It was important that both qualitative and quantitative data were collected during the project so that we could examine different factors of the equation.

The quantitative data collection included, the time students spent reading, the number of books and tasks opened and completed, and even how successful students were in completing the exercises. In this last one – the number of successfully completed tasks – we can definitely see overall development in the kids’ language skills as it shows continuous growth. Students completed the assignments with a 94% completion rate. There were almost no days during the pilot that the kids spent without reading at least an hour. 

Overall 80% of opened books were finished, which is a very high completion rate. This proves that based on the statistics BOOKR Class is highly engaging for students. 

So how did the kids achieve such amazing results, and how did this plan out on a qualitative scale? 

 As time went on, tutors noticed that many students gained confidence in expressing themselves in English and had a broader vocabulary than before. 

Some of the observations teachers shared with us about engagement, user experience and soft skills that children showed improvement in:

Overall we experienced that the children’s emotional well-being improved, they enjoyed learning with the class and showed enthusiasm while using the app. They gained more confidence speaking English, improving pronunciation and vocabulary, as well showing affection for the language itself. Last but not least, reading has become part of their daily routine, which is bound to further deepen their knowledge in the future. 

If you are interested to learn more about the results of the research we conducted, we have a more detailed analysis for you. Click on the link and dive right in!

What can you learn from the lessons in this project and how you can implement the takeaways into your own BOOKR Class journey? 

BOOKR Class can be perfectly used in an environment where resources might be limited as far as human resources are concerned, and when English teachers may not be available. The amazing, dedicated tutors and social associates of Aldeas Infantiles SOS in Guatemala do not teach English, yet they were able to assist the children in their experience and the kids were able to learn using the intuitive illustrations and animations of the app. 

We recommend the app mostly for children who can read and write – however, this pilot proved to us that even smaller children can learn a lot with the songs and games that the app provides. Little ones of ages 3-5 were able to memorize many English words with the help of native narration, songs, and illustrations.

Reading improves wellbeing. One of the missions of the pilot was to make English learning and reading a habit as stories and reading have a direct impact on children’s well-being and social development – and we were happy to observe that this goal was achieved. Tutors – who have known these underprivileged children for a long time – were able to tell the difference between the beginning and the end of the project. 

All we hope is that these children keep up the amazing habit of reading, learning and improving themselves for the rest of their lives. If that happens, we can 100% say that not only were the project goals accomplished but also our company’s mission statement. And to be able to tell that is not a small thing to say.