Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Reigniting a Love for Reading with AI and Avatars with Lawton Smith, CEO of Literal
Lawton Smith is a literacy advocate focused on adolescent reading engagement and the co-founder and CEO of Literal (LiteralApp.com). Praised as a “game changer”, a “Top Tech for Advanced Learners of ELA”, and awarded a rare five stars out-of-five for “Student Engagement” by Common Sense Media, Literal is an all-in-one digital reading platform for modern classrooms that is fundamentally changing what it means to read books on screens.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Why reading scores have declined for over a decade
- How Literal makes classic texts engaging through chat-based formats
- The impact of long-form reading on soft skills and mental health
- How AI is used to scaffold texts with translation, rephrasing, and leveling
- Why playful, personalized reading boosts student engagement
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:01:17] What Literal is and how it's addressing the reading crisis
[00:04:45] Key factors behind the long-term decline in reading
[00:09:45] Adapting books to match students’ media habits
[00:16:20] Lawton’s personal journey losing and regaining reading focus
[00:23:12] Turning novels into chat conversations with avatars
[00:32:56] Expanding the Literal library beyond public domain
[00:36:31] How AI powers Literal’s reading support tools
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🎉 Presenting Sponsor:
This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.
[00:00:00] Lawton Smith: I mean, we are a digitally connected society. Period. To act as if we're not, I think is a fundamental flaw in looking to reverse this 50 year decline in reading. We need to embrace the moment, embrace the positive, powerful aspects of these technology platforms, and then try to harness some of the mechanics in those platforms to make literature.
Much more accessible, right? Let's make it more colorful. Let's make it more interactive.
[00:00:38] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood. K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all
[00:00:52] Ben Kornell: here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter and offer our event calendar and to go deeper.
Check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel. Early access to events. Back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.
[00:01:17] Alex Sarlin: Lawton Smith is a literacy advocate focused on adolescent reading engagement, and the co-founder and CEO of literal. Praised as a game changer, a top tech for advanced learners of ELA and awarded a rare five stars out of five for student engagement. By common sense media, literal is an all-in-one digital reading platform for modern classrooms.
That is fundamentally changing what it means to read books on screens. Laton Smith, welcome to EdTech Insiders.
[00:01:47] Lawton Smith: Nice to be here.
[00:01:47] Alex Sarlin: Alex, really looking forward to the show today. Big fan and um, really grateful. You've invited me to the show. Oh yeah. Well I am a big fan of yours as well. I think we met maybe a couple of years ago now, and I was.
Always so fascinated by what you are doing to sort of make the reading experience modernized for students around the world. It's just such an interesting idea. So let's start with, you know, what literal is and the core problem that you're trying to address. Global reading scores have been declining for a long time.
Students are spending a lot more time on screens, a lot less time reading. What do you see as the factors? Why is reading gone down and what are you trying to do about it at literal.
[00:02:27] Lawton Smith: Good question. So there's a couple of questions there. Let me try and provide answers to each one. Number one, what is literal?
Literal is a reading engagement platform for secondary education. We brand ourselves, position ourselves as an all-in-one digital reading platform for modern classrooms, and that means that we are a responsive. Reading platform to the current culture. Meaning if we're trying to reach our adolescent learners, how do we do that?
How do we meet them where they are, and what does the technology need to look like, feel like? How does it need to operate in order to meet those students in a developmentally appropriate stage of life? And so that's what literal is. Number two, you asked a little about the declining in global reading scores, and I think it.
It is probably good for the audience. Just to highlight sort of where reading scores are right now. There are two types of assessment that come out every year. Two notable assessments. One is in the United States, it's called the National Assessment of Educational Progress or the Nation's Report Card.
The other is an international test. We are focused on adolescent, so we're talking, you know, eighth graders all the way through 12th graders, even though we dove down into some of the lower grades as well. The international test is called the PSA exam, and it looks at international reading scores, math scores, the same way that the US.
NAP test does. Now, looking at all the different markets that these two tests look at, you would assume that there would be some general market differences given the state of the economies, different education programs in different countries. It turns out there's not both. The International Assessment of Educational Progress and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, pizza and Nap point to reading scores being in an absolute free fall.
Especially since Covid. But if you look at the data, it actually started 11 years prior to Covid right around the 20 10, 20 12 timeframe. All of the educational progress over the past 50 years in reading scores and math scores was essentially began to decline and has now been totally wiped out. What that means is both internationally and nationally, 13 year olds are reading at 1972 levels.
Just think about that for a moment. All of the time, resource effort, funds that go into education over 50 years have resulted at this point in time, in exactly no. Progress as far as the reading performance is concerned. So when we talk about the global decline in reading scores, we're talking about really, really concerning numbers.
That's number two. Number three, let's talk about the why. And like many questions, it's multifaceted, right? There's no silver bullet necessarily that you can look at, even though there's certainly one factor that overshadows all the others, and that is technology. Both the availability and accessibility of digital media has had a number of impacts on the way that we all interact with text.
In particular, now, we're going to talk about adolescents a lot today, but the trends that we see with adolescents, if we all look in a mirror, they all carry over to ourselves as well. We know that once you have a smartphone in your hand, the way that you interact with media fundamentally changes. This is reflected in sales in the publishing industry.
It's reflected in surveys done about adult reading habits over the past 10, 15 years. And even though we're talking about adolescence, we can extrapolate that and look at technology's impact on all of us. And if technology has been a core culprit of. Undermining our attention of exposing us to many, many more different perspectives, to resources, to media, to entertainment.
Then we could also potentially look at technology as a solution to address those now very real challenges that we all face. So technology is one, and I can talk about that more in a moment. There's also sort of a systematic. Decline in reading. It's seen across all education environments all over the world, and there has been a trend certainly since the 20 10, 20 12 timeframe where long form reading an emphasis on reading an entire novel has given way to reading short.
Text excerpts. This has been driven by and large by an emphasis on standardized testing and the importance of training students for the test, and I'm not speaking against that. It's critically important to prepare students for tests, but the tests themselves, the way they're written, the way that the assessments are taking place today, put an excerpt in front of a student, ask skills-based questions, and then as long as the student can respond successfully, there.
Then we give them a good grade and we move on and we all feel good about ourselves. But often what we are testing in those short excerpts are hard analytical skills by doing away with long form narrative in classrooms, we are unfortunately undermining many of the soft skills that are required to be successful in professional environments.
And so the skills gap. We talk about in education is not just a student's inability to compare and contrast, and then to evidence that on paper, do the students have empathy? Do they have interpersonal communication skills? Do they understand how individual situations can impact that? Has that been modeled through the literature that they've read?
And so there are a number of factors, technology. A shift towards these short form assessments. And last but not least, I think there's been a broad change in familial culture. We just as a society, no longer really have a culture of reading that we once did. And I would say that's neither here nor there.
It just is what is. The question is, we know that mental health is suffering more than it's ever suffered in the past. This is evidenced since the pandemic, and especially among adolescents, there's a mental health crisis. We know that there is a very strong corollary relationship between engagement with long form narrative literature.
And peace of mind and mental health. You know, there's different studies that have taken place that say reading a book is just as good as taking a walk. For example, as far as clearing your mind, and I could talk about that for hours, so I'll stop there, but technology emphasis on short form testing, and then I think just broader changes as a society are sort of the perfect storm to wipe out 50 years of reading engagement in our classrooms.
I do not think it's at all having to do with the quality of instruction or the intention of the teachers that are
[00:09:45] Alex Sarlin: trying to move the ball. Definitely agree with that. When you mentioned that technology is one of the major culprits of this, which I think is becoming sort of undeniable from a lot of the literature and a lot of the studies, but also potentially can be part of the solution.
That's exactly what intrigues me so much about lit's approach. You mentioned that it sort of is designed to match students' consumption habits and. There's a number of ways that literal does that, and I'd love you to unpack some of them and what you're seeing in the field about which ones are really engaging learners and readers and students.
But one that stuck with me when we first talked is that you have the ability to basically turn whole. Full narrative texts into almost these reading experiences where characters are actually embodied. There are pictures of them and that you can actually see who they are and what they look like, and you can adapt what those pictures look like.
You can have a sort of text chain between the characters to show dialogue. You have AI companions, you have translation. You have all sorts of different techniques to make reading more immersive and engaging, and sort of match how students think these days. Can you unpack some of these features, how you think about them, how you came up with them, and what they sort of look like in the product and in the
[00:10:57] Lawton Smith: field?
Yeah, absolutely. And maybe just let's go back to sort of the state of digital media and how it's changing our interaction with content. If you look at the leading social media apps today, and if, if you look at reports from Common Sense Media, for example, on adolescent media use. It's very, very clear that adolescents today, and I, once again, I would extrapolate this to adults as well on average or on screens for non-educational reasons, for about seven hours a day.
Right now, this is a mix of media. We're talking about games, we're talking about social media, we're talking about video. Yes, exactly. Short form videos, social media games. So many different chatting with friends. There's so many. Different ways to engage and the most compelling, for example, I'm interested, Alex, what do you think is the number one most visited website by adolescents?
Oh my goodness. My guess would be YouTube. Am I wrong? No, you are spot on. So while TikTok is in the media right now and, and they are often switched between YouTube for one and two, it's not Instagram, it's not Snapchat, it's not TikTok. It is and has consistently been YouTube as the number one destination point for adolescents today.
Why, and what does it feel like when you go onto YouTube? Right, it's media centric. There's a lot of imagery. There's animation, there's video, there's ways of interacting and commenting on these videos. It's not considered. A social media site, but it's very social in nature. Social annotation is a key part of the success of YouTube, leaving comments and feedback and responses and likes.
And if you look at that seven hours a day and where time and attention are going. It's going to these very interactive, very social, very scaffolded type of media experiences. That is what has become the norm. Now, whether we want to criticize that or lauded it, it works. It's highly engaging. And YouTube in particular, if you look at.
Its impact on students. It's not all drl, right? This is, oh no, this is not mindless scrolling for hours, even though a fair amount of it certainly can be, but a lot of searching for answers goes through on YouTube. I mean, how many people have repaired a car, fixed a washer, learned how to repair a light by going to YouTube and watching videos on it, right?
I mean, it's really a destination for learning and of course, entertainment. And when you compare that to reading a book. There's just no comparison. As far as the engagement factor is concerned, Dan Kogan, drew used to talk about this quite often, and Matt, the founder of Newsela as well, where they talked about the fact that kids sit in a classroom in a desk, they listen to instruction, and then as soon as that bell rings and sometimes.
During class, they take out their phones and all of a sudden their world becomes alive. Right? All of a sudden, they're interacting with friends. They have social clout, they have social collateral. They're able to explore the world outside the fences that we often artificially place around them today, and.
Despite our attempts and efforts to guardrail in the classroom, what students are doing. And I think those efforts are, you know, very much needed, but we need to not kid ourselves that these kids, especially once they have a foam, the world is open to them. Right. And that's what they explore and that's what they expect because they simply, this generation of students is not growing up with books in their hand.
They aren't, how often do you go down to the shopping mall, for example, or the park and a parent is pushing their child in the stroller? You know, 20 years ago it would've been a pacifier and that's how you pacified, right? The babies and now, what is it, phone, iPad. It's a smartphone. Yeah. Right. They're chewing on the phone.
They're watching the videos on the phone. Yeah. I mean, we are a digitally connected society. Period. To act as if we're not, I think is a fundamental flaw in looking to reverse this 50 year decline in reading. We need to embrace the moment, embrace the positive, powerful aspects of these technology platforms, and then try to harness some of the mechanics in those platforms to make literature.
Much more accessible, right? Let's make it more colorful. Let's make it more interactive. Let's honor and respect the words as they are on the page without simplifying them, without modifying them if we can. But let's use technology to make it more accessible, and that's a core premise for Literals approach to reading.
And as you mentioned, there's a particular way we do that, which if you'd like, I can elaborate on.
[00:16:08] Alex Sarlin: I think you should, because I think for people listening, grounding some of these ideas in what it actually looks like in the app on a screen, I think would help people picture what literal actually does for engagement.
[00:16:20] Lawton Smith: Yeah. Excellent. Well, let me tell you a quick story and then I'll dive right into the mechanics of the app and how it works, and why harnessing technology for good in classrooms can fundamentally change what reading engagement looks like in modern education. I used to be an avid reader, especially as an adolescent, was big into science fiction.
Not so much into fantasy, but big into science fiction. Read a lot of books, loved it. It was an escape for me as life became busier, you know, junior, senior in high school, I read less. I. But still really had a positive affinity for it. Once I was in university and my career took off, I simply didn't find that I had time for recreational reading per se.
There are only two reasons why we read. We read either for education or for entertainment, period. There's no other reason why anyone picks up a piece of text. We're either looking to learn something or we're looking to be entertained in some way. Sometimes, luckily, those two things can be one and the same as career professionals.
We spend a lot of time reading books to help us be better professionals, but we may not necessarily sit down with novels the way that we used to. I went about seven years without actually picking up a novel. Hmm. I think after I read the Da Vinci Code, I didn't pick up another novel again until, gosh, probably 10 years ago, and I missed it.
I found myself missing something in life. I needed some enrichment, and so I. Went down to a used bookstore and I got a copy of Ernest Hemingway's, for whom the Bell Tolls and great book, Ernest Hemingway, of course, writes in very concise sentences, thought it was a perfect narrative to dive back into. So what do you do?
Grab a cup of hot chocolate, grab a warm blanket. You make yourself comfortable and you quote unquote, sit down with a book. I couldn't make it past page two, I found that I no longer had the attention span. Wow. To be able to stay with the text. I had retrained my brain to say, you're missing information.
You need to go check your notifications. There's work you should be doing. There's other things you should be attending to. And that noise within my own head prevented me from actually engaging in the narrative. And it was such a. Distinct moment for me having been an avid reader previously and finding myself unable to pay attention.
It was clear that my reading brain had been affected by technology. Now, at the time I was working with Hewlett Packard, I was an analyst and my analyst brain kicked in, and I immediately wanted to see if I was the only one who had suffered these kinds of impact on my ability to stay focused. And so I started to do some market research, and that led us in a very roundabout way to Southeast Asia where it turns out that.
All over the world, reading scores are declining, but teenagers in Southeast Asia, in Vietnam, in Japan, South Korea, in China, were actually some of the top apps in the app store. Were reading apps for teenagers, and I thought, that's interesting. Let's take a look at those. And it turns out that all of these apps, these are made by companies such as line media, for example, Tencent and.
They were writing narratives in a chat message format. It was almost as if you'd stolen someone's phone and you were scrolling through their text messages, and it was very voyeuristic in that regard, but wildly popular, so much so that there's a company in the United States called Hooked that launched and they hit number one in the app store.
Repeatedly over a period of about 18 months. In fact, if you go to Snapchat ad targeting today, there is a audience targeting feature within Snapchat where you can filter it down to chat fiction enthusiasts. I mean, it, it's, it's a thing. But it's a thing that we are not familiar with in the United States, and certainly in its current form, as I found it was not appropriate for classrooms.
And certainly it was not tied to real narratives, real literature in any way, but the retention metrics were through the roof. At the time, students who were adolescents, I should say reading in this format would have a hundred percent completion ratios on assigned reading tasks. And that was an aha moment that here we have innovation here, we have something that the students themselves are doing on their own outside of classes, and it is reading practice.
How can we leverage that format of chat to tell a story? In a way that could fundamentally change the decline in reading in among US American adolescents, particularly in classrooms, and that was the origin of liberal, is we have set out to adapt this format, which in literary terms. Is scaffolding, which helps build reading, stamina, interest, provide multiple means of engagement with the text, and how do we incorporate that into a product that we can introduce into classrooms to help teachers and students address this decline in reading engagement.
And that is the origin of literal. And so we've built a technology platform really based on some incredible work in machine learning and natural language processing that took place at Columbia. In New York, there's an individual I wanted to shout out. David Elson, who works for Google today, worked on the Google Voice team for a number of years and his doctorate research on the ability of computers to be able to analyze a text, identify who says what, and then presentation that as conversational was foundational creation of literal.
So we've. Built on that foundation, we've of course introduced quite a bit of our own innovation, and we now can take a book like Pride and Prejudice and without changing any of the content, so word for word, we can visualize the conversation that already exist. Within the book, we give all of the characters their own individual avatar.
We assign each of the characters a default name. We isolate. Their dialogue or narration in speech bubbles. And then we simply visualize using this chat messaging type format, the conversation that is already in the narrative, and that makes it incredibly more engaging, interactive and accessible for teens in the classroom.
And because not everybody needs that scaffolding, we've introduced the ability to simply turn it off and read a book in a traditional format, or turn it on and read it
[00:23:12] Alex Sarlin: in a chat view. Exactly. I think that was a really well described and the pride and prejudice example I think is a great one because that is, you know, a classic real literature literature, Jane Austen, and you can imagine sort of the Mr.
Darcys of the world, although you do some really interesting things in terms of the avatars, they are not usually the traditional. Avatars you might see of a character like that in a TV movie or anything like that. So we should talk about that as well. You can split all the dialogue out, but you also have every word of the book.
So it's not just the dialogue. How do you present the text of the book? That was the first question I had when I looked at literal, and I think you have some interesting ways to look at it.
[00:23:51] Lawton Smith: Yeah, so take for example, pride and Prejudice. The opening line of Pride and Prejudice is universally adored. It is a truth, universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. If you go two lines down from that, so it's easy. If you're gonna present that in a chat messaging format, you just put that opening line in a speech bubble and you're done. Right? But it gets a little bit more complex than that if you want to respect the actual content without simplifying it in any way.
So the third line of frightened prejudice. Begins with Elizabeth Bennett's mom talking to her husband, and she says, my dear Mr. Bennett said his lady to him one day. Mm-hmm. Have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last? Now there are two voices in that line. There's the character who's speaking, Mrs.
Bennett, who says, my dear Mr. Bennett, but then mid-sentence narration, it turns to mid-sentence narration where the narrator cuts in and says, said his lady to him one day. And then it cuts right back to dialogue. Have you heard that Netherfield Park has let it last? And so there are two separate voices in that single line of text.
And so what we do is if this were a chat conversation between characters, everything on the left in literal is dialogue. And so my dear Mr. Bennett. That would go in its own speech bubble. We assign an avatar for Mrs. Bennett. We put her name associated with it, and then as soon as the narrator cuts in said his lady to him one day, that narration comes in from the right side of the screen in a blue speech bubble labeled as the narrator.
Hussein and then as it switches back to dialogue, it cuts right back to, have you heard that another foot Park has let it last? It's essentially taking any text, especially those in the public domain, even though we have others, and turning it into a very readable script of sorts. The characters are all identified.
We've added the avatars, we've added the speech bubbles, and all of these mechanics that make texting and chatting so easy on our phones really, really lowers the cognitive load that students experience when they encounter a large uninterrupt. To body of text. In fact, the Onion Magazine several years ago ran a headline that said America runs into one continuous body of uninterrupted text and gives a collective gasp.
Right? It's just not the world we live in. Large bodies of uninterrupted text. We consume our media in bite-sized formats. TikTok, you know, 32nd videos, even though they have longer form videos than
[00:26:37] Alex Sarlin: even the New York Times. I mean, when you read news online, they split the paragraphs and they create a lot of line breaks, and they're very careful to deliver the text in a way that breaks it up for screen readers.
[00:26:47] Lawton Smith: Very much so. There's a great book by, uh, someone called Maryanne Wolf called Reader Come Home and in Reader come home. She specifically addresses cognitive load, cognitive friction, and how digital devices literally have retrained our brains. And once again, I. I'm not mourning the loss of something here, right?
This is technology. This is progress. It's just the reality of the technology. It activates fundamentally different parts of our brains. What literal strives to do is keep us in that digital reading brain, but at the same time, right, activate the deep reading mechanics that are we need to be able to function in societies, you know, empathetic, deep thinking, critical thinking human beings.
[00:27:31] Alex Sarlin: Yes. And so I wanna dig into a couple of things you're saying, just quick shots, because I think there's some other elements that are really interesting. So let's talk about the avatars really quickly, because I imagine, you know, reading purists might say, well, part of reading is imagining what the characters look like in your head without, you know, a cue.
You are very clever, I think, in how you do avatars for these different characters without overdoing it, without completely grounding students, but also. Sort of bringing representation into the mix. Tell us about what you do to create these avatars of Elizabeth Bennett and Darcy and the, you know, hun, thousands of other characters that you cover.
[00:28:07] Lawton Smith: Yeah. Great. And, and I think I should highlight the fact that, you know, I'll talk about the avatars here, and as you mentioned, quick shots. There's a million other different features here. If we're gonna reverse a 50 year decline in reading, I'm sorry, it's not gonna take one tool or two, it's gonna take the entire toolbox.
And that's what literal does is it incorporates an entire toolbox of evidence-based reading strategies directly into the platform, which removes the requirement for a teacher to scaffold text themselves, for example. And one of the means of scaffolding that we offer are these character avatars. It just simply helps with association.
So for example, if you read, I think War and Peace for example, has like. 350 characters or something in the text, right? It's just ridiculous. And there's no way that we can retain that many character names in our working memory. So it's very, very common, even for AVID readers to read a book, come across a character name and say, now who was that?
And then they have to go back and read two or three pages previously to catch up and remember who they're talking about. A character avatar provides a visual scaffold, which simply says, here's a face. And once you are able to associate a face with a name, it really changes your affinity for text and the engagement with the text.
So how do we choose the avatars? First and foremost, we do try to honor what the author has written. And so, you know, if someone is short and stout or tall and lean, has red hair, has dark skin, like however it's reflected in the text. We try and represent the avatar accordingly. In the book, we don't always get it right, and sometimes we do take a very large creative license.
We, you know, take a wild stab at it. So, for example, Denzel Washington recently starred in a remake of Macbeth, um, to wide acclaim. And we do something similar in literal. You may read a book with, uh, character avatars that are surprising, that are unexpected, and that novelty is actually a critical component of engagement on the platform.
However, it is true. Activating your imagination while reading is one of the reasons why kids love reading. In fact, we talked to a thousand middle schoolers a year or two ago, one-on-one. We interviewed them. We asked them what they liked or didn't like about reading and why they liked it. And the students themselves said one of the number one reasons, in fact, the number one reason why they like reading is because it activates their imagination in ways that video doesn't.
Hmm. Right. It's a powerful, powerful feature for engagement. And one of the core reasons why we do read, we read to escape. So if we've gotten it wrong with our character avatars, we allow students to actually change that avatar. And whatever they see in their mind, they can. Choose a picture for a character that reflects what they'd like to read.
So for example, it fundamentally changes a reading of Romeo and Juliet. If you know you, you've got Kim Kardashian and Kanye West as as Romeo and Juliet. Right Now, obviously it's up to the individual, what they choose to put there, but. It allows an element of personalization and there's an individual named Robin Pearson who ran Global Publishing.
He was the head of global publishing at Lego Group and over a number of years, Lego did reading research into how do we get reluctant readers or non-readers, especially adolescents and children, how do we get them engage with text down to. If you introduce elements of play or playful reading, then the amount of engagement completely changes.
Why can we play video games for hours? Right? We like solving puzzles. We like being challenged. We like being able to play. While we're learning, which is what video games afford, and it's very, very similar and literal. You can customize the character avatars, personalize it, make it yours, and then you can enjoy any literary text with a cast of your choosing.
But we certainly, I would say, you know, shoot the first shot to give you a starting point as you read the book.
[00:32:25] Alex Sarlin: One of the things that is also interesting about literal, I think you should expand, but you've used two examples. Pride and Prejudice. And War and Peace. Listeners will notice that these are texts that are hundreds of years old that are in public domain, and you mentioned the public domain in passing, but you also know that the reading content cannot just be limited to open source public domain.
Literature and you've done some really interesting work to expand and create a literal library that includes lots of different types of texts. Tell us about how you've done that and what type of text is in the literal library.
[00:32:56] Lawton Smith: Yeah, great question. So obviously there's some sensitivity in education today, sensitivity that is legislated around the type of content that we make available to students in schools.
So we've needed to be very aware of those legislative, the legislative environment. Around reading, and we've built a number of features into the app to help with the curation. Now it all starts with a baseline. So what kind of content do we bring into literal? We look for titles that, of course, are in the curricular canon.
So we do go to, for example, to the college board. We look at the titles that they recommend. Everybody read before college, we go to state approved reading lists. In Florida, for example, they have the best standards. What Florida has done very well with their standards is they've actually provided a very large list of titles that are pre-approved for schools.
So we start with those and that's why we see so many Hamlets, Macbeth's, pride and Prejudice, for example, in literal, they are required by the curriculum and they are the most complex dated for students to read. So literal is most powerful on those legacy texts that we need to do everything we can to make them more accessible today, and unlike many, it is our philosophy that those texts are very much relevant.
I mean, there are themes that can be taken once again with soft skills from these canonical texts that do translate. Into modern required skills in the workplace. But you know, there's a lot of books written by dead white guys as as, as it's often said. So how do we get a leg up and make sure that the content library ref is more reflective of the composition of modern classrooms?
A highly diverse student body. Which is changing every year. Obviously there's a lot to do in education today with trying to find relevant reads, and so we've signed publisher agreements and partnership agreements with, I think we've got over a dozen publisher partners and authors that we work with today.
We've just recently signed an agreement with Harper Collins. Um, that's a preliminary announcement. We'll make the full announcement here in a couple of weeks. All told within the content catalog between our publisher, author relationships, our big name relationships with Harper Collins, one of the big five publishers, and a wonderful provider, partner of ours called Comics Plus, we now have.
Close to 20,000. Once Harper Collins comes in, we'll have between 25 to 30,000 titles available and literal, highly diverse content library, all curated and with additional content controls. If teachers do need to ensure their classroom environment meets state standards.
[00:35:43] Alex Sarlin: I know it's taken a lot of work to build a library like that and a lot of creativity.
I think it's really, really exciting to hear the size of that library and all the different types of titles you have in there. So this is sort of a segue to talking a little bit about the AI piece of what you do, which you mentioned. Yeah. Many people remember, I think they're called the Folio Edition.
They, the additions of the Shakespeare, the Hamlets, and Macbeths that a lot of us read in, in high school had this two-sided piece where the left side was the Shakespearean English, the sort of Elizabethan, and on the right they'd have a little bit of. Scaffolding, you know, slightly modernization. They talk about what certain phrases mean, and it's sort of this side-by-side reading meant as a scaffold.
And I think you do some really interesting versions of that in literal, and I'd love you to talk about that and how AI is used to do that.
[00:36:31] Lawton Smith: So there's two questions there and I'll answer them concisely. So yes, we do side by side viewing of the text, and so you can take an original piece of content. Now, not all of the publisher partners that we work with allow this, right?
There are very much some copyright concerns, there's rights issues. And so at least for all of our canonical texts, there are robust annotation and support learning tools within the platform. And so let's take a, uh, the Great Gatsby, for example. Within literal, you can click on any line of a Great Gatsby and translate it into over 160 different languages.
If you look at the composition of modern classrooms, it's not simply, you know, simplifying the text that that is a requirement. We do have. Very real language needs in US classrooms today. And if you are studying world languages anywhere in the world, or you're an English language learner anywhere in the world, you need the English reading practice.
And so what we do is we provide language translation support on a line by line basis. So you can click on any line, select the language you wanna read it in, and all of a sudden you can be reading The Great Gatsby in English and Tagal side by side. Right, or Haitian Creole or Arabic or French Spanish, of course.
And so it allows the exact same text to be accessible to a very diverse classroom of learners today. There are other needs within a classroom, right? Not only are there complications for teachers to deal with in languages, but there are also proficiency. Gaps within a classroom, right? You have a subset of students who are avid readers, knock it out of the park, can curl up with a book at night and love it, and others who can't read.
I mean, this is very real classroom situation today, and so you may need to provide audio support for the texts. You may need to provide a leveling or a simplification of the text, and so within literal, once again, any of the thousand books that we have in the platform that have the rights permitted. You can actually open one of those books, simplify the text at any reading level on demand.
You can read it in any languages. And our most recent feature, and one of our most popular is a new feature we've introduced called Rephrase. I. Rephrase allows you to take the Great Gatsby and say, what would the Ga Great Gatsby read? Like if it were written by a Valley girl, for example? Right. And you've never read The Great Gatsby until you've read it completely rephrased as if a valley girl were the writer.
And so this goes back to Robin Pearson and, and the concept he proved at Lego of playful reading. And what you can do within literal, with playful reading is really have some fun in reading the text. So we have pirates, we have valley girls, we have monsters who eat cookies, right? I mean, all these different sort of fun.
Different ways of experiencing the same text with different word choice and different voice, and that is actually a critical reading path evidenced by state standards where it is required to analyze, compare, and contrast the same text in multiple formats, how word choice impacts tone. You can model all of that within literal, and what we see students doing, Alex, is once again, no one tool is going to work.
What we see students doing in the platform is they'll log in, they'll start in a chat format. They'll read for a couple of minutes. They'll switch to audio, they'll switch back to chat. They'll read in plain view, they'll open rephrase. And what this does with all these multiple means of engagement, and that's a.
Principle that we've adopted that comes from the Universal Design of Learning, or the UDL framework from the cast group came outta Harvard is multiple means of engagement within the text. And so while we do offer this fun sort of playful rephrasing simplification of the text translation features, what we're really doing is simply providing multiple means of engagement and that builds interest.
Stamina and enjoyment and what we're seeing today when a teacher introduces literal and it gets used in a classroom, we are seeing reading sessions that go anywhere between 20 to 45 minutes at a time of sustained silent reading. And that's really unheard of when it comes to classroom reading engagement in today's classrooms.
[00:41:05] Alex Sarlin: So that's, I think a great segue to talking about something you just mentioned, which is the teacher role in literal, how literal is used in classrooms. So tell us a little bit about how literal is used in formal learning environments like schools and how the AI features in literal. Complement that type of usage.
[00:41:23] Lawton Smith: Yeah. So there are two primary use cases for this technology in classrooms. Number one is for assigned reading. Within the platform, teachers can create assignments. We do use artificial intelligence. We're permitted in order to create formative assessments within the platform. Um, these are all aligned to item types that typically appear on state exams, and so we're very much trying to fit within a teacher's workday and their ultimate objectives, and that's the primary case, is assigned reading.
The second primary use case is independent reading. Where in Texas, for example, it is mandated by law that teachers make time for independent reading within the classroom, and, uh, literal enables them to do that. It's like a Netflix for books. You log in, you have access to all 20,000 titles within the platform, and kids can explore and read on their own.
All of the reading metrics are reported back to the teacher. They get. Full visibility into student behavior. That's typically how we see it deployed. Artificial intelligence is of course, not only in the zeitgeist, but is a fundamentally transformative technology. Uh, we've incorporated it into the product in very intentional ways.
We look at it as an accelerant, not a replacement for traditional types of reading in a class. And so we use it for formative assessment, creation, and initial grading today, while it's ultimately in the hands of the teacher, we also do have an AI inbook assistant. It's called ada. And ADA allows a student to click on any line of a book and get an explanation for just that line.
So it's very targeted support. To build understanding within a text and obviously the rephrasing and things. Those are also powered by artificial intelligence. And so in literal you'll find AI much more under the hood. You, you know, than something that we believe will transform classrooms as a standalone product.
We believe it. We transform classrooms as an add-on product to core reading in modern classrooms.
[00:43:16] Alex Sarlin: Amazing. So. I am a really a big literal fan. I followed your trajectory for a couple of years now, and it just is so exciting to me. It really is one of my favorite EdTech products. For all the reasons you mentioned it, it sort of marries a serious, serious need in classrooms to a really innovative technological solution that tries to meet kids where they are, but also meet educators where they are.
Yeah. In terms of curricular standards and assessment, can you recommend a resource? Well, actually first, where can people find literal online?
[00:43:45] Lawton Smith: So you can find literal@literalapp.com. That will take you directly into the app. If you'd like to explore a little bit about literal, you can go to literal app.com/edu and that takes you to our marketing side.
It'll take you through a couple of videos and explain what we do. In more detail.
[00:44:03] Alex Sarlin: I highly recommend everybody go in and try this type of chat-based reading. Look at what it actually looks like because it really is a very different conception, very modern conception of what reading could look like, and it built on that chat fiction concept.
What resources would you recommend for people who wanna dive deeper into this modern reading approach?
[00:44:22] Lawton Smith: Yeah, so there are two resources that I would recommend. Number one is a book by Maryanne Wolf I mentioned earlier. It's called Reader Come Home. Really a foundational piece that processes the moment in time that we're in and how technology is impacting our brains as it comes to reading.
Remember, reading is not something we're born with. It is an invention. Reading itself is a technology. None of us are born with the ability to read. It is a learned skill and it is an invention that humans have made a very, very valuable one and one that has been around for, you know, thousands and thousands of years now.
So the fact that technology is changing our reading brain is a fundamental change in in civilization Reader Come home by Maryanne Wolf. Great peace. There is also a researcher. Her name is Janet t Twinge. I'm. Pronounce her name wrong, I apologize. But if you look at any of her work, it really dives deep into adolescent media use and specifically talks to, and lays it out in very real numbers where we're at as far as adolescent media use.
And it is the catalyst of course, for, you know, the anxious generation and those kinds of totally other works that have come out after that. Two, I highly recommend.
[00:45:38] Alex Sarlin: We will put links to those resources in the show notes for this episode as always, as well as a link to literal app.com. Check it out.
Literal is doing something very interesting to engage readers in the modern era. Thanks so much for being here with us. Laton Smith, CEO, and co-founder of. Literal. Thanks for having me, Alex. Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community.
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