Excellent Tool to Enhance Students' Reading Comprehension

November, 2014
Rewordify is a great web tool that you can use with your students and kids to help them read difficult passages. Rewordify simplifies complex passages and render them reader-friendly. Students can paste in difficult sentences, paragraphs, or whole chapters and then click on "Rewordify text". They will then get a paraphrased version of their text with a simpler and easier vocabulary.The reworded words are highlighted which means that students can click on them to hear and learn the origin harder words.

Rewordify also allows you to obtain a simplified version of any web page. Just paste in the URL of the webpage you want to read in the yellow box and hit 'Rewordify'.Watch the video below to learn more about how Rewordify works.

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Excellent Chart Featuring 6 Reading Comprehension Strategies

November 25, 2014
Here is a great resource on reading comprehension strategies I came across today in my Google Plus feeds. This is basically a chart created by the folks in Scholastic and is available for free download in PDF format. The chart features 6 major reading comprehension strategies that students can use to improve and enhance their reading comprehension skills. These strategies are:

1- Making connections:
Encourage students to make connections between what they are reading and their personal experiences. They can relate it to events, people, issues and other things in their life.

2-Visualizing
Students can use this strategy to help them create visual pictures of the meanings they uncover from  the text.

3-Asking questions
To actively interact with a text, students need to be able to ask questions related to the text like what the message of the text is, what value does the text add to me? Why is the author saying so�etc

4-Inferring
Students need not only contend themselves with the visible textual output but should delve deeper into the hidden layers of meanings drawing on external clues and inferring meanings  that would not otherwise be exposed.

5- Determining importance
Students should be able to determine main and topical ideas of the text and be able to understand and articulate them clearly

6-Synthesizing
This is where students use their analytic skills to create a coherent and meaningful body of ideas drawing on both the information they have garnered from the text and their existing knowledge.

Click HERE to download the chart

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Two Handy Web Tools to Develop Students Reading Comprehension Skills

October, 2014
A few weeks ago I posted here in Edtech and Mobile Learning a list of useful web tools to enhance students reading comprehension. Today, I am adding two other tools to the list. Check them out below:

1- ReadWorks

ReadWorks is an excellent platform that provides effective free resources to enhance students reading comprehension. It also gives teachers a bunch of research-proven tools and support they need to improve the academic achievement of their students.
ReadWorks also provides a wide variety of reading materials that are aligned to the Common Core Standards. These materials include both non-fiction and literary passages that students and teachers can access online for free. There is also a section on ReadWorks called " Lessons & Units" that features a plethora of lesson plans and comprehension worksheets for teachers to use with different grade levels. The lesson plans are arranged into four main categories: skills and strategy units, comprehension skills, novel study units, reading passages. 

2- Reading Bear

Reading Bear is a great tool for helping kids learn to read. Reading Bear integrates both vocabulary practice (over 1200 vocabulary items) and phonetic awareness ( covering different phonetic principles and patterns of written English) into their lessons. All of these lessons are provided in the form of narrated presentations playable either as a video or as an interactive slide show. Presentations are available in seven different versions. In the fullest version, the narrator sounds out a word slowly and quickly, then blend it slowly, and finally (after an optional prompt) blend it quickly. As sounds are pronounced, the corresponding letters are highlighted. Then a picture is displayed illustrating the word, show a sentence (with the individual sounds again highlighted, karaoke style), and finally show a video illustrating the sentence.

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Improve Students Reading Comprehension with These Common Core Aligned Materials

October 11, 2014
ReadWorks is an excellent platform that provides effective free resources to enhance students reading comprehension. It also gives teachers a bunch of research-proven tools and support they need to improve the academic achievement of their students.

ReadWorks also provides a wide variety of reading materials that are aligned to the Common Core Standards. These materials include both non-fiction and literary passages that students and teachers can access online for free. There is also a section on ReadWorks called " Lessons & Units" that features a plethora of lesson plans and comprehension worksheets for teachers to use with different grade levels. The lesson plans are arranged into four main categories: skills and strategy units, comprehension skills, novel study units, reading passages.

To learn more about ReadWorks watch the video below.

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