Group items tagged

Another nice free spot where you can check out Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning-Fog scores, and so on. Check the readability of a text before assigning it to your students. Have your students check the readability of their own writing to see if they are at college at level.

Insert a URL on this page and it will render a readability score. This could be helpful to determine readable authentic materials. However, I suspect most webpages all run pretty close to the same level. This would be interesting to experiment with.

A list of books divides by readability level, by genres, by authors. One teacher says they are not the "best" books, but handy for creating reading lists by grade/reading ability. Includes poetry also.

"The readability index is a bit coarse, but it is helpful none-the-less. The index use a simple ranking of "basic," "intermediate," and "advanced." In order to sort by readability you have to open the advanced search tools then select "reading level" from the drop-down menus." This blog entry has some screenshots to help understand the process.

"I attended a webinar two week's ago featuring Stacey Harris of Brandon Hall Group and Mark Hellinger of Xyleme. The topic of conversation was this idea of going mobile with your learning; a hot topic in the learning space no doubt. They touched on the concept that learning expectations have shifted with all of the new technology, which has caused change among those who are initially developing the content. Furthermore, while social media monitoring and exploring, I am seeing an increase in not only speculation of that point, but a firm belief from others in the industry that there IS a shift happening in todays learning market. People haven't exactly been able to call it by name, but its being felt. People are feeling a shift from the current learning demands of just getting the information out there, to infinite accessibility and readability. " = Dawn Poulos An interesting article on how e-learning is responding to the push-pull of mobile accessibility.

"Twurdy is actually based on Google, but it analyses Google results for readability, so it can help you to find more lower level texts for learners without you having to read through every result from Google to see if it's simple enough. Just type in the topic of the text you need and click on your Twurdy type. You have a choice of three different Twurdy types. The differences are mainly speed (how fast you want your results) vs complexity (how thoroughly you want the results analysed) I would recommend choosing Twurdy with Pop as this will analyse the number of word on the page, length of sentences, number of syllables per word and also the popularity of the words in the text." After finding a good text, you could create lessons with Hot Potatoes for it. Nik's blog entry also includes related links for reading, such as "Prompting reading speeds" and "Comparing Texts to aid Noticing"

This blog describes a strategy for teaching reading that involves note-taking and crowdsourcing notes. Has links to the lesson directions and to a detailed discussion of the plan in use with a sociology text.