LeOn: Digital reading platform receives top prize for reading promotion!

LeOn: Digital reading platform receives top prize for reading promotion!

The team from the Professorship of German Didactics at Chemnitz University of Technology recently received an important award. On February 18, 2025, the team led by Prof. Dr. Michael Krelle honored with first prize in the category “Outstanding Reading Promotion with Digital Media” at the German Reading Prize in Berlin. The prize has been awarded annually since 2013 by the Reading Foundation and the Commerzbank Foundation to honor innovative approaches to promoting reading.

The excellent digital reading platform “LeOn” appeals to students in second to sixth grades. This learning environment was developed in collaboration with over 900 students and more than 50 teachers from North Rhine-Westphalia and the software company Outermedia. “LeOn” combines proven reading promotion methods with modern digital media. This enables individual reading support through texts of different levels of difficulty and offers students the opportunity to record their own reading samples.

Innovative approaches to promoting reading

Loud TU Chemnitz In the future, the evaluation of these reading samples will be AI-supported. This technical development is part of a comprehensive plan to further develop “LeOn”, for which the state of North Rhine-Westphalia is providing 1 million euros. Schools that work under difficult conditions in particular should benefit from this funding.

The platform has been available to all schools in North Rhine-Westphalia via the Education Media Library NRW since June 2023 and already has around 150,000 registered users. The goal of the development team is to make “LeOn” accessible to schools in all German federal states.

As part of the reporting on innovative reading promotion projects in Germany, the 78th school in Leipzig-Grünau was also awarded first place in the “Outstanding reading promotion in schools” category. This school impressively shows how reading motivation and reading skills can be promoted through personalized online reading programs and “tandem reading” with reading sponsors. A separate subject called “Reading” was even introduced in science classes, which illustrates the school’s committed approach MDR reported.

Digital media in teaching

The discussion about digital formats in teaching continues to gain momentum. Educators are faced with the challenge of adapting their teaching and learning cultures to these new circumstances. Digital media should not only optimize traditional teaching, they should also fundamentally reshape teaching and learning German school portal determines.

A notable initiative in this context is the “LES-O-Mat”, a website by children for children that promotes reading animation and participation in the digital world. The project, which is being implemented at the University Learning Center in Munich, divides books into different age groups and subject areas. In small groups, children create book recommendations in the form of cartoons and thus promote digital text skills and creative work.

These developments show that reading promotion in Germany can be enriched through both traditional and digital approaches. New forms of teaching and technologies offer promising opportunities to get children excited about reading and to strengthen their reading skills.