Wilma, Visma’s ubiquitous online school administration service, is providing the GraphoGame early literacy skills app in English for all children of Finland. This donation is in support of Finland’s new curriculum, which now begins foreign language studies in the first grade. The learning app will be available for free download in English. It can be used with mobile devices, tablets or desktop computers, and is an important complement to regular school work.
Jukka Holm, CEO of Visma Enterprise Ltd behind the Wilma-service for schools in Finland says:
"We believe the ability to read and converse in different languages will be one of the critical skills in the future working life. That is why we want to give the use of this early literacy game as our Christmas gift to all children now starting to learn English as their first foreign language according to our new curriculum in Finland.”
“We are so happy to discover GraphoGame and are confident its academically researched methodology will support this new curriculum, especially in times of remote learning.”
Wilma service is already used by 98% of Finnish elementary schools and will be used as a channel to inform schools about GraphoGame. Besides elementary schools, Wilma is used in secondary schools and organisations and is now being expanded to early childhood education.
Supporting early literacy skills in remote learning
Grapho Group works with a diverse set of impact-oriented organisations to enable the paid distribution of GraphoGame as a free national literacy resource in various countries worldwide. Customers also include school suppliers, schools, speech therapy clinics and parents.
Mervi Palander, CEO and founder of Grapho Group Ltd says:
“We are extremely happy about this joint impact project with Visma Enterprise. With the GraphoGame app, we can provide safe and engaging complementary literacy training to support remote learning in Finland right now. It is important to us that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, we make our contribution to ensuring the learning of critical life skills.”
Graphogame has been proven to complement early literacy education and offers individualized and adaptive learning to children with different needs.
Mervi Palander continues:
“We like to make ourselves available to everyone, even though we put kids first. So far, we have exceeded over 1,5 million downloads across Android, iOS and Microsoft app stores, and the numbers keep increasing around the world. It is great to see so many countries making literacy skills a national priority.”
Advancing literacy skills worldwide
GraphoGame was initially created by the University of Jyväskylä and Niilo Mäki Institute from Finland as a result of decades of longitudinal research and development. It is a literacy software and e-learning methodology that has been used as part of the Finnish school curriculum for over a decade to support literacy instruction.
Since then, GraphoGame has been contextualised into multiple languages including English (British & American), Brazilian Portuguese, French, Spanish, Chinese Pinyin & Zhuyin, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Bahasa Indonesia, CiNyanja and Swahili by top universities around the world. These include the University of Cambridge Centre for Neuroscience in Education, Haskins Laboratories (Yale) and Aix-Marseille University for the British English, American English and French language versions of GraphoGame, respectively.
Wilma service’s paid distribution of GraphoGame for British and American English adds Finland to the growing list of countries where GraphoGame is offered as a free national literacy resource. The list includes Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, France, Norway, Panama and the USA, where GraphoGame is being used as a literacy intervention for 4 to 9-year-old children and struggling English readers.
Media contacts
Berit Virtanen-Thewlis, PR & Communications, Grapho Group Ltd, +358 40 511 4460
Sanna Burton, Communications Director, Visma Finland, +358 50 322 5222
About Wilma service
Wilma is a safe web service for schools where all kinds of information can be shared in real-time. The information is contained, e.g. personal data, schedules, attendance and messages. Students, guardians, teachers and the administration are all active users of Wilma, and every school can customize what information to show and when. https://www.visma.fi/wilma
About Visma companies
Visma makes businesses more efficient, through offerings of software, commerce solutions, retail IT-solutions, and IT-related projects and consulting. Visma simplifies and digitalizes core business processes within the private and public sector. 1 000 000 customers in Northern Europe utilize Visma's products and services. The group has over 11 00 employees and its net revenue amounted to EUR 1.5 billion in 2019. In Finland, Visma has ten subsidiary companies, employs ca. 1400 people and serves over 100 000 customers. Visit www.visma.fi/enterprise to learn more.
About GraphoGame
GraphoGame is an academically researched learning game for teaching children early literacy skills in English, French and many more languages. With 250 million illiterate children in the world and up to 10% of all people having dyslexia, teachers and schools struggle to provide the 1-on-1 support these children need. GraphoGame produces analytics of the child's decoding & phonics practice, allowing teachers to quickly react to bottlenecks in their learning. GraphoGame is evidence-based, meaning all content has been developed, studied and validated by experts in universities around the world, such as the University of Cambridge and the University of Aix-Marseille. Find out more at www.graphogame.com.
