Columbia, MD (PRWEB) March 18, 2013
In support of National Reading Awareness Month, Unbound Concepts today announced the release of its BookLeveler™ App v3.0, a free, in-hand tool for educators to find accurately leveled educational content for students in their classrooms. The update includes key functionality requested by users since the release of version 2.0 and provides teachers with a solution to address many of the pain points of Common Core State Standards implementation.
“BookLeveler v3.0 is a comprehensive update to our previous prototype versions, and our focus has been to ensure that the app is usable and relevant in classrooms,” commented Benjamin Bengfort, CTO & Cofounder of Unbound Concepts. “We have expanded the functionality and feature set available to educators, as well as grown the library that powers the app – a key demand from our growing base of loyal users. Another significant update is that we now include the results of our text analysis engine – Meridian™ – to provide greater insight into why books are at particular reading levels. This allows teachers to better use the app to craft standards-aligned curricula.”
Significant Additions to Bibliographic Data Result in Improved User Experience
Unbound Concepts recently added nearly 350,000 records to its bibliographic database, transforming its searchable database by 14-fold, a direct result of Unbound Concepts efforts to provide users with a more robust experience. Version 3.0 also links associated titles; as such, unknown ISBNs now prompt a search for similar titles with leveled feedback, allowing users quick access to the levels they seek. These changes provide more comprehensive coverage of K-12 books throughout the app and allow for a more user-friendly experience.
Meridian Badge Eases Implementation of Common Core State Standards
BookLeveler v3.0 introduces the Meridian Badge – an interactive manifestation of Meridian levels. Powered by collaborating educators using BookLeveler, Unbound Concepts’ language processing engine, Meridian, combines crowd-sourced levels with advanced Natural Language Processing to automatically determine the reading level of a book. Meridian also produces Indicants of a reading level – common elements found (or not found) in a book that are strong suggesters of reading level. Several Indicants, such as repetition, knowledge building, and strong relationship of images to text, align directly with Common Core State Standards.
Number of Users: Over 3000
Number of Books: Over 374,000
About Unbound Concepts
Unbound Concepts was created on the strongly held belief that a collaborative approach to knowledge sharing is, quite simply, a better way to live. Blending computer science with trusted teacher recommendations from BookLeveler, Unbound Concepts is powering a proprietary text analysis algorithm, Meridian, that can understand authored content in a deep semantic fashion, bringing value to publishers, educators and fellow scientists in pursuit of collaboration that creates good. The company is co-located in the Maryland Center for Entrepreneurship incubator in Columbia, MD and in the inaugural cohort at Socratic Labs incubator in New York, NY.
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