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The Common Core State Standards for Reading call upon students in grades K-12 to read and comprehend complex literary and information texts independently and proficiently. But before students can learn how to tackle complex texts, teachers must be able to identify texts that meet this challenge. In Big Skills for the Common Core: Literary Strategies for the 6-12 Classroom Amy Benjamin and Michael Hugelmeyer outline six traits that can be used to identify complex texts and the difference between informational texts and literary nonfiction.

How to teach text structures for better reading comprehension and improved retention. Teachers of history, science, and other subjects are now expected to weave literacy instruction into their teaching of content. But how should they do that? What are the most effective ways to help students learn to read challenging content-area texts? This article breaks down the research behind explicit teaching of text structures and includes a video that shows how to do it (Great for content-area literacy)

While there are both pros and cons to using digital textbooks to replace printed texts, the use of digital textbooks is definitely on the rise. Check out these stats about e-texts.

"Read and Write for Google is an excellent Chrome app that provides text-to-speech functions from your browser. They have just released a free iPad and Android app. The apps provide text to speech functions, which are great for ESL, learning disabled, visually challenged and struggling readers, on your device, just like the web app does in the Chrome Browser and Chromebooks.

From Dan Russell. Abstract:  What does it mean to be literate at a time when you can search over billions of texts in less than 300 milliseconds? Although you might think that "literacy" is one of the great constants that transcends the ages, the skills of a literate person have changed substantially over time as texts and technology allow for new kinds of reading and understanding. Knowing how to read is just the beginning of it-knowing how to frame a question, pose a query, how to interpret the texts that you find, how to organize and use the information you discover, how to understand your metacognition-these are all critical parts of being literate as well.

Rememble is a organises your digital bits and pieces. Thread together texts, photos, videos, sounds, scribbles, scans, notes, tweets. The website allows you to upload text, pictures, video, and audio clips from a PC or mobile phone (by texting the multimedia to Rememble's number), then saves the information in a timeline. Users can collaborate with other users and share their Membles

Summarity is a software/website that condenses articles into digestible pieces it culls through the text and finds the sentences that seem most relevant. Summarity produces two types of results - block text of the summary, or a skimmed version that puts the summarized sentences in bold type. You can also use the Summarity bookmarks in your browser to block text or skim the actual website you are reading."

Educators looking together at student work using structures and guidelines ("protocols") for reflecting on important questions about teaching and learning.">
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vozMe: From text to speech. online tool that offers applications and services to convert text into speech. vozMe uses speech synthesis systems and technology to provide voice resources to any website or add speech synthesis to any web browser.

A website where you can type in some text and it will turn it into a shape of choice

Managing a list of cell phone numbers can be a daunting task. Here are seven services that educators can use to easily send and manage group text messages.

The aim of this conference is to start educators talking, thinking and responding to the 'creating multimodal texts' objective in the Australian Curriculum for English. Multimodality permeates learning in the 21st century. The question remains about how equipped are we, as educators, to support students to create and respond to the diversity of multimodal texts that bombard them every day.

"What is Poll Everywhere? The fastest way to create stylish real-time experiences for events using mobile devices Poll Everywhere replaces expensive proprietary audience response hardware with standard web technology. It's the easiest way to gather live responses in any venue: conferences, presentations, classrooms, radio, tv, print - anywhere. It can help you to raise money by letting people pledge via text messaging. And because it works internationally with texting, web, or Twitter, its simplicity and flexibility are earning rave reviews."

Texting and Tweeting good for literacy? Follow the professor with the research...

A text editor is a simple & plain online word editor software. It supports to edit your word files in Mac, Windows, and Android platforms for free

From Robin Good: Beeclip EDU is a web app which allows anyone to easily combine images, video and texts to create instructional scrapbooks, moodboards, collages or portfolios. Images can be easily searched and imported via Google Images and Flickr, and text can be easily added in a number ways. Visual objects can be positioned and personalized on the page and final scrapbooks can be downloaded or printed. Free to use. Can be tested without registering.

Electronic resources represent an increasingly important component of the collection- building activities of libraries. "Electronic resources" refer to those materials that require computer access, whether through a personal computer, mainframe, or handheld mobile device. They may either be accessed remotely via the Internet or locally. Some of the most frequently encountered types are: E-journals E-books Full-text (aggregated) databases Indexing and abstracting databases Reference databases (biographies, dictionaries, directories, encyclopaedias, etc.) Numeric and statistical databases E-images E-audio/visual resources

Turn simple photographs into videos using this site. Once you sign up (it's free) you begin by choosing a video template and then adding your pictures from Facebook, Flickr, or your computer. You can set the order of your pictures, add captions to them and add text slides if you wish. Next you add music, either from their library or add your own from your computer. Your last step is to add a video title and any additional text and you're done. Completed videos can be uploaded to You Tube or Facebook and can even be embedded into a website or blog. The site does have a 30 picture maximum but that is long enough for most people.

Some great ideas for teaching with and creating Illuminated texts

Wordle is a toy for generating "word clouds" from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.