Reading & Other Learning Disabilities

Breevy is an inexpensive software program that can dramatically reduce the number of typing keystrokes needed to type anything. It takes one unique word that you create and turns it into whatever set of words, sentences, or paragraphs you connected with it. For me, xrdbto becomes Reading Disabilities: Beating the Odds, xpe becomes Professor Emeritus of Reading Disabilities and Special Education, Queens College of CUNY. Clearly, the ability to expand one unique word into a string of meaningful words can dramatically decrease the typing burden on teachers, parents, and students with learning disabilities. Here are examples:

Teachers. Teachers can save time, effort, and keystrokes by creating a master list of comments about student papers. To avoid typing a frequently used comment like this—“I sense that your ideas have considerable merit, but I’m not sure. The reason for my uncertainty is that your paragraphs are loaded with long abstract words rather than simple concrete ones.  Please rewrite your introduction, using short concrete words. You can find good examples of how to do this on pages 132-137 of your text. Let me know if you want to discuss this or need any help.”—teachers need to type it only once and connect it to a unique keyword that they create, such as xshortconcrete. Once they type the keyword, teachers can quickly personalize the comment.

Parents. Parents who need to frequently write their child’s school can also develop a master list of comments. To request a meeting with John’s teacher, a parent might e-mail his teacher this message: “Dear Mrs. McCormick, I’d like to meet with you to discuss John’s progress and his homework assignments. Can we meet next week, after school? If not, let me know when. Because I work at a physical therapy center in the morning, a late afternoon meeting is best. You can e-mail me at info@reading2008.com or call me at 111-000-5000. As always, thank you. Sincerely, Mrs. Piccolo.” A parent can frequently e-mail this entire message by typing the message once and connecting it to a unique keyword, such as xteachermeeting.

Students. Students must often retype headings and the like. By creating one unique keyword, they can save dozens, maybe hundreds of keystrokes. Here’s what the unique keyword xheading—a keyword of 8 strokes—produced for Emma: Emma Bronchick, P.S. 202, Grade 4, Mrs. Gordon, Room 2004, English Assignment.

Eight strokes produced 72 characters.

One Caution for Teachers and Parents. If you want children to use Breevy, first learn how to use it yourself. Become adept and comfortable with it. This should take only a few minutes. It will probably take longer for children with learning disabilities.

One Trick for Teachers and Parents. Identify the common spelling errors that a student inevitably makes. Make these errors into unique keywords in Breevy. If, for example, Ryan typically types wretin for written, make wretin a unique keyword. Then, when he types wretin in whatever software program he’s using, the screen will show written. You can teach him the correct spelling at a different time, when it doesn’t interfere with his flow of writing.

Two Additional Benefits. Breevy comes with a helpful spelling dictionary that automatically corrects common mistakes. It also allows you to create a unique word that starts a new program from within a currently running one. When I’m in Word and I want to add or subtract some numbers, I type xcalc and a calculator appears on the screen. This saves an amazing amount of time.

A Request. If you tried Breevy, please tell our readers if  you liked it, how you used it, and how it might help children, teachers, and parents. By sharing your thoughts, you might help lots of children.

You can get more information about Breevy at http://www.16software.com/breevy/

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