Newsela is a tech solution that helps students improve their reading comprehension by having built in activities with each text that students read.
They provide thousands of real-world texts (non-fiction) to engage students with different interests. Each piece of text is also available in 5 reading levels to help students start where they are. This is also neat because if you have multiple teens in the same grade, they’re able to work together even if they are at different reading levels.
All the texts are vetted to national & state standards as well.
Learn more about Newsela here.
Learn about their success stories here.
Rewordify is a free online tool where students can copy & paste the text they’re reading into the engine, and it will replace the “difficulty & hard to understand words” with simpler words to help comprehension.
There are many useful features & settings on the website to aid reading comprehension.
Changing reading levels: Rewordify allows you to choose different reading levels & with specific text to be able to see a more difficult version or easier version of the word.
Auditory: There is a built in text-to-speech function that enables students to enjoy the text auditorily as they practice
Tips & activities: After identifying hard to understand words, the tool will provide students with different activities on how to improve & learn that new vocabulary
Quizzes: There are wordbank quizzes with matching that are offered to reinforce vocab learning
Texts: There are also texts that students can access on the website like Shakespeare
Learn more about Rewordify here.
Snap and Read is an online tool that is similar to Rewordify. It’s useable as a Google chrome extension and allows students to highlight text that they don’t understand & it will replace the difficult words with simpler words.
The outlined text will be placed into a sidebar where the student can access easily once the feature is activated.
Learn more about Snap and Read here.
Click here to see the Google Chrome extension.
Mindmeister helps students break down difficult to understand plotlines, texts, or concepts with graphics. This is a free online mind mapping tool.
Students can use this tool to add characters, thoughts, questions & break them down individually.
There are options to start from scratch or to use templates/frameworks. With the frameworks, a student would be able to fill in for instance the different parts of a plot (conflict, climax, conclusion).
Learn more about Mindmeister here.
Inspiration maps is an alternative, learn more here.
Readworks is a nonprofit organization that provides a curriculum, content to read in multiple categories, and tools for free that help students improve reading comprehension. This is a great tool for all grades K-12.
Similar to a few tools mentioned before, they provide texts in different levels of difficulty.
They also offer questions that are automatically graded & enable you to track student progress.
If you’re looking for a full self learning tool for the summer, this could be great for your student.
Learn more about Readworks here.
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