Press Release: Miscellaneous Announcements
GoSpoken Partners With Celebrities & BlackBerry To Develop Literacy Skills
Posted at 7:57AM Tuesday 24 Nov 2009
GoSpoken.com, co-owned by ex-SAS operative turned author Andy McNab, has partnered with actress & author Michelle Gayle, The Reading Agency & BlackBerry to leverage cutting-edge technology to develop literacy levels in schools through a national workshop study. The innovative workshops gave select secondary school pupils, aged 12-15 years, from across three schools in Halton, Southampton & Crawley the opportunity to read, write & share stories on BlackBerry handsets. Led by Michelle Gayle, author of Pride & Premiership - a mobile novel, students engaged with the creative writing workshop - discussing & contributing their own ideas using the Smartphone's. The aim of the workshops is to research the adoption of reading digital books on mobile phones, and the interaction of users with digitally created content - as authors or contributors – in an innovative and modern way. Actress & author Michelle Gayle said; "The pupils seemed to take to reading on the BlackBerry's immediately and when they began to write their own stories on them a teacher remarked that they seemed to focus more than they do in the classroom". The project is part of the Research & Development strategy from Mobcast – parent company of GoSpoken.com, investigating the impact of mobile technology & distance learning. The goal is to encourage user engagement with authors & content, and to create a mobile platform for users to contribute to a story, or contribute as an author. Similar concepts such as Keitai books in Asia have proved very successful in Japan where books written on mobile-for-mobile became physical bestsellers.
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