How to Use This Course

BEGINNER

Alphabet Layout

This course is designed around something most learners can understand - the alphabet. 26 letters, starting with the A lesson and ending with the Z. Lessons can be accessed by pressing the A-Z buttons from left to right. Many learners will already know the alphabet before they come to this course, but, if you are coming to this without knowing the alphabet, then the pre-lesson Alphabet helps you learn it. After that, each lesson, A-Z, focuses on one single letter and all the sounds that can be made with it, and all the ways it can be spelt. Click on the activities one by one going down the page from top to bottom! We've laid out the activities in logical order, but, if there is one you find hard, skip it, go on to the next, and come back to it later! The activities will tick on the right when completed (some require a passing grade - usually around 70%, others merely need to be viewed).

Grades and Badges

You can check your grades by clicking the grades button under your profile name and picture in the top right. Click on this course (Truphonics), and you will see the list of activities and your grades.

To see what badges you have earned (and why), click on your dashboard on the left and you will see the badges block appear on the page. 

Click on individual badges to download them and to see what they were awarded for. You can also see them by opening the side draw on the right when within the Truphonics Course, you will see the Latest Badges Block. Note that some badges have BEGINNER, INTERMEDIATE and ADVANCED levels for the same badge! Try to collect them all! We later plan to have a tech tree for you to add the badges to - all to come!

Speech Recognition

Beep! Bee-boo-beep!

We have a little OXDA Robot who can recognise your voice! When you enter the speech recognition activity you will see a screen like this:

Read the instructions, and down the bottom, push the 'Push here to speak!' button in blue when you are ready to speak! Speak the words it says after Say 'in quotation marks.' You can even sing songs and the robot will try to recognise your words! What a clever little robot it is! It is still a robot though, so please forgive it if it doesn't recognise your words sometimes - it doesn't mean your English is bad!

You can also choose to do the speech activities with a UK accent or a US accent, depending on where you are from and which you prefer! The preferred accent is noted in the activity names - so choose the one you want!

Please note, that for the speech recognition activity to work, you will need a microphone on your computer AND you will need to use Google Chrome browser!

Levels

INTERMEDIATE

There are three levels to the Truphonics^TM Course, BEGINNER, INTERMEDIATE and ADVANCED going down the page in each lesson. We suggest you complete ALL the BEGINNER activities for all the letter lessons A-Z before going back and doing the INTERMEDIATE activities for all the A-Z lessons, and then doing the ADVANCED activities for the A-Z lessons, but if you wish to learn in a different order that it entirely up to you! We do not require one activity to be completed before another can be attempted (we could, but we don't!).

ADVANCED

Beta, Free and Paid

This course is currently in Beta stage, which means it is useable but still under construction and development, so please forgive if something is less than perfect or not yet ready! Your feedback is golden and this forum is ideal! At present, for the Beta, all activities will be accessible. The plan is to make BEGINNER level FOREVER FREE, including the downloadable BEGINNER Flashcards and Workbook! INTERMEDIATE and ADVANCED levels will later require a single one-time paypal payment of $X (that's a single payment for BOTH levels, not each!), at a price to be determined (but it will be very reasonable - like the price of a book!) which will also include downloadable INTERMEDIATE and ADVANCED Flashcards and Workbooks! 

Compared to many other phonics courses that charge monthly subscription fees of anywhere between $10-20, and will sell you resources like books separately, we think that represents great value (and I loathe subscription models)! By embedding existing Youtube videos (yep, it's legal use, as it rewards the creators with views) and open source software (Moodle LMS which is free to use), and by NOT being an app, we have kept costs relatively low for this quality of course. It is not going to be quite as smooth and flashy as some of the other apps, but we have come to love the power and functionality of the Moodle platform. Most important for a phonics course is the ordering and the method, the quality of the content, and this course takes students up to a level which other phonics courses will not. I wrote this course first for my students who needed it (it was originally a predendum to the Drammar Courses), and later for my own daughter as she was learning to read. With this single low payment you will be supporting our work and helping us keep this site ad-free (ads - cringe!), and we thank you deeply in advance! But, that's for later, so for now enjoy EVERYTHING for free! You can reward us with your feedback on the forums, and by telling friends and family (and even schools and teachers) about us!