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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

"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

"Flows of Reading takes this process to the next level. We have created a rich environment designed to encourage close critical engagement not only with Moby-Dick but a range of other texts, including the children's picture book, Flotsam; Harry Potter; Hunger Games; and Lord of the Rings. We want to demonstrate that the book's approach can be applied to many different kinds of texts and may revitalize how we teach a diversity of forms of human expression.  We look at many different adaptions and remixes of Moby-Dick from the films featuring Gregory Peck and Patrick Stewart as Ahab to MC Lar's music video, "Ahab" and Pitts-Wiley's Moby-Dick: Then and Now stage production to works that evoke Moby-Dick less directly, including Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan and Battlestar Galacitca's "Scar." "

"While preparing for the upcoming school year, Twisted Sister's epic protest song began playing as I read the Declaration of Independence. Obviously my mind drifted to imagined Thomas Jefferson and John Adams letting their hair down and dancing around the streets of Philadelphia during a break from drafting the epic document. I realized then that I serendipitously uncovered something that I could use in the classroom - pairing music to primary documents to demonstrate understanding!" Taylor - I read this and immediately thought of you. Assignment for student - Remix the text of a primary document or famous historical speech with a song or multiple songs that add to the theme of the document/speech. Example included in the post.

"A good lecture is not merely a piece of writing read aloud. It is a performance art in which the sound of the lecturer's voice, his body-language, and the visual materials used are part of the performance." Interesting take on lecture. Could be a good read for teachers who consider themselves to be story-tellers and not necessarily lecturers. I agree that there is a time and a place for lecture in most subjects, but most of the "lectures" that I see (and plenty that I gave when I was in the classroom) don't follow these particular pieces of advice.

"Basically Rewordify takes a block of text or website and replaces difficult words and phrases with text that is easier to understand. The site claims that this helps students read more, understand difficult English faster, and learn words in new ways. I'd throw in that the site can help you and your students break down difficult primary documents." Rewordify tool as primary document decoder

A great collection of Bloom's math question stems

Seems the blank out comic words and fill them with whatever you're reading so that it makes sense would be a pretty decent project for any English class.

"Textual analysis has its limitations, of course, but word counting can illuminate the tendencies of writers in a way that word reading may not." Textual analysis leads to a discussion on author's style. You could do this type of activity with various Word Cloud Generators.

"Welcome to the Documentation site for Voyant Tools, a web-based text analysis and reading environment. Here you will find some help for getting started, more complete documentation for tools (including a collection of screencasts), useful resources (tutorials, workshops, examples), and general information about Voyant Tools." Amazing textual analysis tool. View word frequency, word relationships and more. H/T Tom

"The Web Literacy Standard is a map of competencies and skills that Mozilla and our community of stakeholders believe are important to pay attention to when getting better at reading, writing and participating on the web. "

I was reading a blog this morning and ran across this link to a search engine for pictures and graphics that let's you search in a variety of ways including creative commons and flickr. It's a little easier to use than searching there for me. Try it and see what you think.

A friend shared this with me and it's a good read. It also summarizes the way that many of our teachers think, and could be an interesting article to share with a teacher and have a discussion about. Ultimate, I have a huge problem with the assumptions and conclusions that are being made here: "Now I'm not calling for abuse; I'd be the first to complain if a teacher called my kids names. But the latest evidence backs up my modest proposal. Studies have now shown, among other things, the benefits of moderate childhood stress; how praise kills kids' self-esteem; and why grit is a better predictor of success than SAT scores. All of which flies in the face of the kinder, gentler philosophy that has dominated American education over the past few decades. The conventional wisdom holds that teachers are supposed to tease knowledge out of students, rather than pound it into their heads. Projects and collaborative learning are applauded; traditional methods like lecturing and memorization-derided as "drill and kill"-are frowned upon, dismissed as a surefire way to suck young minds dry of creativity and motivation. But the conventional wisdom is wrong. And the following eight principles-a manifesto if you will, a battle cry inspired by my old teacher and buttressed by new research-explain why." Why are these seen as two completely different and opposing philosophies of education? That's my question. From my experience, teasing knowledge and understanding out of children stresses the hell out of them. They struggle to give you an answer initially, but when when you are unwilling to spoon feed them or provide them with a "drill and kill" answer, they finally make a connection. In doing so you show the students that their grit and determination has helped them gather a better understanding of the material and become a better student and learner in process.

I may write a decent response to this. She plays just about every false argument card in the book. It needs this treatment - http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/10/huntsville_teacher_common_core.html

This take down of Gladwell's dyslexia chapter http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=8123 makes for a similar parallel.

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."

"For the non-innovators, everything gets in the way.  But for the general innovators, the main barriers are learning challenges and contracting constraints.  The big finding is that for the novel innovators, there are no external barriers." I like this article a lot and I think I will use it in a faculty meeting. Ask the teachers to create a list of barriers to good instruction. After they come up with a ton of stuff, have them read the article for shock value. Then, discuss.

"Twitter has offered me an intellectual community I otherwise lack. It cuts the distance, both geographic and hierarchical. Not only can I talk with people in other places, but I can engage with people in different career stages as well. A sharp insight posted on Twitter is read, and RT'd (retweeted), with less regard for the tweeter's resume (or gender or race) than it might be if uttered at, say, a networking event. Social media is a hedge against the white-shoe, old-boys' networks of publishing. It is a democratizing force in the literary world."

"You've seen the tasks. You've read the research. You're basically bought in. But how do you begin? More importantly, how do you introduce students to inquiry driven learning?" h/t Dan Meyer

"Should schools be mirrors of society, or should they be places apart? With Greenfield, I come down for the latter. Schools have an opportunity to take students' minds in new directions, and they've only got 1,000 hours each year to do it.  " Interesting read. Yes, time is limited, but appropriate use of technology can help to "take students' minds in new directions," often in directions that might not be possible without the use of technology.

"This site lets you use a Bookworm database to read Obama's State of the Union in the context of all the other State of the Union messages given by American presidents. For any word in the message, just click on the text: the word will turn red. If you want to search a two-word phrase, just highlight both words. (You can't search for phrases longer than two words)."

Gives the language learner the ability to read or listen to text with translation only as needed. Also includes videos and songs with lyrics. It creates a wordlist and flashcards so the student can master the new vocab.