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Do you teach struggling readers? No matter the content area that you teach, student success is often defined by literacy. Reading comprehension and vocabulary frequently act as roadblocks that prevent students from grasping difficult concepts. Rewordify is a tool that will help you ignore this roadblock, and even teach reading comprehension and vocabulary when used appropriately. I initially read about the tool from this blog post (http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2013/08/rewordify-helps-students-read-complex.html#.UhuJ79KsiSp). If you don't have time to check out that entire post, here is a brief summary of the tool and a few possible uses for it: Tool Description: This online tool allows the user to input a chunk of text and replaces all the "hard words" with synonyms. This seems like a spectacular tool to promote reading comprehension across the content areas. Here a just a couple ways you could use this tool. * Have you found a website with incredible information, but the reading level is way too high for your students? Have the students use Rewordify and make the reading level more appropriate for your students. * This could be a great tool to teach new vocabulary and reading comprehension. Here's one idea on how to do this: o Have students read a passage and highlight/underline/annotate the passage, including making notes of the words that they don't understand. Then, have the students summarize what they have read. Input the same text into rewordify and have the students read and summarize what they have read a second time. Compare the two summaries and discuss any similarities/differences. Now, have the students create definitions for the words that were highlighted (Students cannot use the provided synonym when completing this portion of the activity). William Berry Dept. of Organizational Development, Quality and Innovation Moody Middle School ITRT - (804) 261-5015 http://blogs.henrico.k12.va.us/techtips/ http://blogs.henrico.k12.v

"Hemingway is a free tool designed to help you analyze your writing. Hemingway offers a bunch of information about the passage you've written or copied and pasted into the site. Hemingway highlights the parts of your writing that use passive voice, adverbs, and overly complex sentences. All of those factors are accounted for in generating a general readability score for your passage."

passage banks are used by teachers for comprehension assignments. Schools who did not pass the SOLs are being asked to use them

"FluencyTutor for Google is a new offering from Texthelp. FluencyTutor for Google is a Chrome web app (works on Chromebook, PC, Mac) that allows teachers to share selected reading passages with their students. Students can hear the passages read aloud. The text being read aloud is highlighted to help students follow along with the reading" Might be useful for ESL and SPED classes

An interesting model for novel reflection in general and vocabulary specifically. "Favorite passage: "The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!" Words looked up: Mole (As in "downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves ..."): A massive, usually stone wall constructed in the sea, used as a breakwater and built to enclose or protect an anchorage or a harbor. Decoction: An extract obtained from a body by boiling it down. Orchard thieves (Melville refers to having to pay for things as "the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us."): I have no idea what this alludes to. Update: D'oh! I am dumb. I (repeatedly) misread this as "orchid thieves," no doubt because I recently read the book of the same name. Yes, the meaning of "orchard thieves" is clear."