Here Is A Great Tool to Help Students with Their Reading and Writing Process

October 17, 2015
Notetaker is an excellent tool from ReadWriteThink that students can use in their writing and reading activities. This is basically a hierarchical outlining tool that enables learners to create detailed outlines made up of five levels. Using the integrated editing features, students can easily add main and sub sections to their outlines, move text boxes up and down, zoom in and out and many more. Additionally, Notetaker provides three outline styles to choose from : bullet, Roman Numeral, and Letter. Students can choose the style they want to use and start working on their outlines.

There is also a separate section called ‘Notes’ where students can jot down side notes to accompany their outline. Outlines created via Notetaker are saved in HTML format which can be printed or edited later on using any HTML editor. Students can use Notetaker in their reading activities to ‘to compile and organize reading notes, research, and related ideas. During the writing process, students can use the tool to organize their information and plan texts in the prewriting stage and to review and structure their ideas during writing and revision.’

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Two Very Good Tools to Help Kids learn to Read

September 25, 2015
Below are two resources we are sharing for the first time here in EdTech & mLearning. These are basically two web-based tools to use with your kids and young learners to help them learn to read. They provide a plethora of games, activities and lessons designed specifically for beginner readers. These tools are also available for iPad.

1- Teach Your Monster to Read

‘Teach Your Monster to Read is a series of games which help children to learn the key first stages of reading.  Combining top quality game design with essential learning, the games complement most systematic synthetic phonics programmes.They have been designed in collaboration with leading academics from The University of Roehampton…Teach Your Monster to Read is completely free to play on desktop and laptop computers. The new Teach Your Monster to Read: First Steps iPad app costs £3.99/$4.99 to download from the App Store.’

2- Reading Eggs

‘The program has been developed by a highly experienced team of educational teachers, writers and developers. The Reading Eggs program focuses on a core reading curriculum of phonics and sight words using skills and strategies essential for sustained reading success. It completely supports what children learn at school and will help to improve your child’s results at school…With interactive animations, fun games, great songs and lots of rewards, Reading Eggs is a great place to learn to read. Children are highly motivated to return again and again. At Reading Eggs, learning to read is enjoyable as well as very rewarding. Every lesson ends with a new book and a new critter to add to your growing collection.’

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Here Is A Good Tool to Help Students with Reading and Writing Activities

July 17, 2015
The Graphic Map is a great tool from ReadWriteThink to help students with their writing and reading activities. Using this graphic organizer, students will be able to represent high and low points related to particular items such as: the number of the chapter in a book they have read, the date a particular event happened, the scene in a play students have read or watched, or any other item. Any item selected can be rated using criteria such as : high/medium/low, smileys, or through digits. Students can also write a concise description of the topic and add a picture to illustrate their entries.

According to ReadWriteThink, Graphic Map can be used ‘as a prewriting activity, as students map ideas for an autobiography; as a postreading activity, as students map the significance of events in a story; and as a reflection and assessment activity, as students map the high and low points of their inquiry process.’

To get started using Graphic Map, students have to type in the title of their graphic map and name of the author. Next, they select one of the items from the list and choose how they want to rate them. The final stage is where they will provide a short description of their item and add an illustrative picture. When done, they can print out their work and share it with others.

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4 Powerful Chrome Apps to Enhance Your Reading Experience

May 24, 2015
Here some very good Chrome apps to help you enhance your online reading experience. The extensions we curated for you today allow you to create a comfortable reading environment where you can enjoy your reading with no distractions and no eye strain. Using these apps will enable you to eliminate  ads and flash animations from your page, browse multi-page articles in one, seamless view, disable surrounding webpage noise and clutter and many more.  Check out the list below and share with us what you think of it.

1- Readability

“Readability is a web and mobile app that zaps clutter and saves web articles in a comfortable reading view. The official Readability extension for Chrome provides a better way to read online, turning any web page into a comfortable reading view right in your web browser.”

2- Clearly

“With one click, Clearly makes blog posts and articles clean and easy to read. Clearly eliminates all distractions from your online reading experience, and even allows you to browse multi-page articles in one, seamless view.”

3- Read Mode

“Just click on the glasses icon in the address bar, the current page will turn into a nice-to-read black on white page allowing you to read without forcing your eyes. Ads and Flash animations are also removed while on read-mode. Click the icon again and everything will go back to normal.”

4- Easy Reader

“EasyReader can customize and improve the readability of long web articles
Make any article or part of a website more readable!’

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Two Very Good Apps to Enhance Students Reading Skills

March, 2015
Below are two good Chrome apps to help students improve their reading skills. The apps provide reading practice using passages specifically designed to challenge learners reading abilities. Students will have access to a variety of built-in tools to assist them with listening to and practicing reading passages.And in the case of Fluency Tutor, they can even record entire passages and listen to themselves reading them aloud.

1- Read & Write for Google

Read&Write for Google™ offers a range of powerful support tools to help students gain confidence with reading and writing, including:

•  Hear words, passages, or whole documents read aloud with easy-to-follow dual color highlighting
• See the meaning of words explained with text and picture dictionaries
• Hear text translated into other languages
• Get suggestions for the current or next word as you type
• Turn words into text as you speak 
• Highlight text in documents or the web and collect for use in other documents
•  Simplify and summarize text on web pages

2- Fluency Tutor

This is an app we learned from EdTech Guy. This is a web-based program allows students to open Fluency Tutor™ for Google reading passages in Google Drive.Some of its features include:
Allows students to open reading passages via Google Drive.
Provides support tools to assist students when listening to and practicing reading passages.
Allows students to record passages and listen to themselves reading aloud.

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A Good Tool for Reading and Summarizing Long Articles

March 9, 2015
Not having enough time to read a long article? Too LongDidn’t Read (TLDR) does the job for you and provides you with a condensed summary of the main ideas of the article. We have installed the app and tried it on few articles and it appears to work perfectly.

TLDR analyzes the content of the article and creates a synopsis of it. You can also highlight text to be TLDR’ed for use with comments or on social media. We have checked user reviews in the Chrome web store and noticed several people gave it good ratings. We thought you may want to give it a try and see if it works for you. Watch the video below to learn more about Too Long Didn’t Read app.

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A Beautiful Visual on Reading Tips to Use with Students

January 8, 2015
Here is a very good read shared by Edutopia on their Facebook page.’5 Tips for Helping A Student Read” is an article written by Rebecca Alber in which she shared some interesting insights on how  to get your students to love reading by helping them make the best of their reading choices. Next time you want to assign a reading task to your students, keep in mind and reflect on the following:What do you know about your kids’ reading interests and likes? Assess past reading experiences of your students and identify what worked and what did not work.

The visual below created by @Worldlib sums up the 5 reading tips to help students find good books. You can also read the full article with more details on each of these tips from this Link.

Source of the visual: http://goo.gl/3Dj0Lv

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