The prescribed use of POD (10 daily sessions of one hour each) is designed to enhance Behavioural Reading Techniques, hypothesised to open new neural pathways and ‘create the learning and reading brain’.

 

POD intervention is based upon the multi-deficit hypotheses (phonological, cerebellar and magnocellular) of dyslexia using computer-based tasks requiring central executive processing, sequencing, visual and auditory processing as well as phonological awareness skills.

 

POD is web based and available via online subscription. The initial design stimulus of POD is based on several software programs commercially available that may or may not have been used in the Tyquin Group Speech Pathology and Reading Clinic over the last decade.

 

The design of POD in its delivery and content has evolved following the global improvements in computer technologies and web speeds.

 

Measurement and observation of student responses using standardized testing and anecdotal data has provided direction for POD software design to improve foundation skills necessary for reading including:

● Visual perceptual skills (visual tracking, visual memory, visual discrimination,     visual form constancy and visual closure);

● Auditory perceptual skills particularly auditory discrimination;

● Phonological awareness skills; and

● Central executive sequencing.

 

Use of POD is prescribed and recommended for students eight years and over who have not been diagnosed with epilepsy or other neurological disorder. It is assumed that thorough instruction in evidence based methodologies from Phonological Awareness and Synthetic Phonics has occurred in the early years but poor performance arising from various underlying deficits still occurs or the student never received this training for various reasons.

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In addition to task requirements, students are instructed to verbalize what they are doing, wear coloured and clear glass lenses alternating between the right and left eye daily (to increase the visual load and central executive loading to alternate hemispheres), tap out phonemes and read letter combinations phonetically (nonsense words) as well as spell using letter names.

 

Directly following the ten POD intensive sessions, students are instructed to read using the Behavioural Reading™ techniques. By combining the two therapies, it is anticipated that improvements in processing and phonological awareness skills combined with explicit reading instruction are transitioned into effective and efficient reading behaviours.