Personal Story Leads to Dyslexia App for Teachers

Amir Bar, Ed.M.’22, was, as he describes it, “a pretty bad student.” Growing up in a kibbutz in Israel, he struggled to keep up with his schoolwork, especially in reading and writing. In high school, he was good at writing code, but typos often prevented the code from working. He eventually considered going to college after gaining confidence while serving in the Israeli military but faced a big obstacle: doing well on entrance exams.

“I knew that if I wanted to go to college, I needed to catch up on a lot of things,” he says, “but one major thing that I was missing was English. That’s something I could not teach myself.”

He moved to Houston to immerse himself in the language through ESL classes. He again struggled until a substitute teacher told him something no other teacher had: She suspected he had a learning disability. Bar got tested and found out he had dyslexia. He started working on his reading skills and enrolled at Houston Community College before getting his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Houston. 

Bar decided he wanted to help other students who were in the same situation, so he recreated a tool that had helped him: flashcards. “The most old-fashioned thing you can imagine,” he says. Eventually he started a company called UC-N-LEARN (pronounced you-see-and-learn) that morphed the physical flashcards four years later into an app created by his business partner, David Crawshay, that digitizes reading intervention instruction. Using a school’s existing curriculum, the app emphasizes visual, image-based learning for all learners, but especially students with dyslexia. 

One of the key features of the app, Bar says, is that it allows teachers to get a deeper sense of each student’s reading capabilities, which is especially important for detecting issues like dyslexia. 

“The nature of dyslexia is that you can teach the same group the same exact things, but different students will be struggling with different skills,” he says. “It's important to assess the students all the time and understand what they learned.” 

For most teachers, this constant assessment can be time consuming, especially if they’re taking notes using pen and paper. It’s also challenging to analyze lots of data over time. “With our app,” Bar says, “we ingest all that information and analyze the progress of each student, per skill. Some of the programs schools use may have 60 different skills across the program, and if you are a teacher trying to analyze it on your own, it'll take you literally hours and hours per week to do all of that.” The app does it in minutes. Teachers can also share progress reports with students and parents to help them better understand how a student is progressing and where more work needs to be done.

UC-N-LEARN’s app also helps teachers better uncover the nuances of what students are learning or struggling with. For example, teachers often have students read out loud to check accuracy level and word counts per minute, and to hear the type of errors the student is making. 

“There’s a lot of insights that you get from just listening to a student read a paragraph,” Bar says. The app lets teacher upload a specific lesson and assign it to the students who record themselves reading. The teacher can listen or have AI give an initial analysis of the reading. The app also provides advanced analytics, noting, for example, that a student over time struggles with “ch” words, getting it wrong eight out of 10 times. “The teacher may then want to intervene by sitting with that student and focusing on that sound because that’s probably going to improve their reading in the future.” The app identifies students with similar skill levels so that the teacher can easily pair students to work together.

Bar says that coming to the Ed School, after nervously buying GRE study guides three times before applying, was instrumental in helping him launch UC-N-LEARN. 

“After I got into HGSE, I started taking all my classes in the mode of ‘I want to develop something and I need to better understand the tools that I need to that,’” he says. “I used all the activities in whatever class I took to work on that idea. I remember the first class I took was with [Lecturer] David Dockterman, and one of the things he said was, don't fall in love with your product, fall in love with the problem because then you stay honest in solving it. Your ego is not attached to an early idea that you're not willing to change because you think, that’s my idea! If you focus on the problem, Dockterman said, you will be critical about the solution and you’re going to improve.”

While Bar was still taking classes, the first iteration of the app was created — and then scrapped. “I realized, we’re not going the right way,” he says. “It was difficult to admit that something that we built early on didn’t move the needle.”

By the time he graduated in 2022, he had what’s called an “early proof of concept,” essentially a prototype that could be tested to see if his idea would work in the real world. Today, the app is currently being used in hundreds of schools across 150 districts in Texas.

As the company continues to grow, Bar has joined the Houston chapter of the International Dyslexia Association’s board and is part of a committee that reviews updates to the Texas Dyslexia Handbook. He says his connection to the Ed School has also remained strong.

“I’ve been meeting with David Dockterman every two weeks or so since I graduated,” he says. “His perspective has been so helpful and it’s such a valuable relationship that came out of getting my master's degree. It's priceless, basically.”