Bloom Story + Dictionary for children

Bloom
1

Hi,

I’m new to Bloom and we are exploring ways to develop a story book for children that will serve as the building block for a child-friendly dictionary.

  1. Can we have a story book and text/picture dictionary in the same story ?

  2. Is it possible to generate a cumulative dictionary in Bloom based on children’s stories developed using Bloom for a minority language ( roman characters ) ?

Thanks !
Ester

2

@e2025
Hi Ester,
I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking. Bloom allows you to combine many types of pages within one book, so you could certainly include a story along with a picture dictionary.

The picture dictionary pages are not presented by default in Bloom. To turn them on, go to Settings > Advanced Program Settings > Show Experimental Features.
Of course, you can create your own custom layouts using the Change Layout bottom at the top right of any page in Edit mode.

With regard to generating a cumulative dictionary, are you asking if that is something Bloom can do automatically? The answer to that is no.

Please let me know if I can clarify anything further.

3

But I think maybe the Leveled Reader or Decodable Reader tool automatically creates some sort of wordlist for you. Not sure if that would be helpful to you or not.

4

@e2025

Can we have a story book and text/picture dictionary in the same story ?

As Andrew wrote, yes.

Is it possible to generate a cumulative dictionary in Bloom based on children’s stories developed using Bloom for a minority language ( roman characters ) ?

This is an interesting idea. Can you please say more about how you envision it working?

5

Hi John,

The translator/ literacy dept wants one app for several stories and everytime a story is added, the new terms are added to the child friendly dictionary including the audio / images used for the word in the story

How about the other scenario of one app per story together with the dictionary with audio and image and then a separate (cumulative) dictionary app content is generated based on the content of a bloom library made up of several story apps for a specific minority language group ? I’m thinking that way, it’s more modular and the children can individually create their own apps using a template.

Thanks.

6

every time a story is added, the new terms are added to the child friendly dictionary including the audio / images used for the word in the story

OK, sounds cool. I afraid I don’t know of anything that can do that.

jh

7

Hi John,

If the terms can be extracted from one library (set of different story books for one language), what file and what location will a script look for to extract the terms and audio / images ?

Also, is there any advantage in having several stories in one app or separate apps for each story book ?

Thanks,
Ester

8

Bloom books are HTML (like web pages). So any programmer you employ would be able to look in there and figure out how to extract all the text.

Also, is there any advantage in having several stories in one app or separate apps for each story book ?

That’s probably a bigger issue than I can quickly address here. I will say that there are situations where “apps” make sense (and it is starting to be possible to publish Bloom books using SIL’s Reading App Builder).

For Bloom we are mostly focused on a “kindle” model, which is not about “apps”; it’s a single app, the Bloom Reader. You push books to it from Bloom, get them from other people’s phones, or download them from Bloom Library. (For the next few weeks, this later method is currently limited to a subset of BloomLibrary). You can also read books directly on BloomLibrary.org, e.g. see this nice sign language book.

jh