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"Highlight the text to read aloud, and select "Start Speaking Text" from the right-click menu. If you just want to make it read out single word, you don't really need to Highlight the word, because SpeakingFox picks up the word under cursor automatically."

Analyse text content using our free text analysis tool which gives you statistics about a text including word count; unique words; number of sentences; average words per sentence; lexical density; and the Gunning Fog readability index.

"Tagxedo turns words -- famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text."

The Word List Generator Project is a database of 2084 words that elementary school teachers can use to help students practice and build sounding out and word-form recognition skills.

"NaturalReader is a Text to Speech software with natural sounding voices. This easy to use software can convert any written text such as MS Word, Webpage, PDF files, and Emails into spoken words. NaturalReader can also convert any written text into audio files such as MP3 or WAV for your CD player or iPod."

AnswerTips® are small information bubbles that define any word when double-clicked. An AnswerTips-enabled site or blog means visitors get fast facts on 4 million topics provided by Answers.com when they double-click on any word, without opening a new browser or following outbound links. *This is a great tool for a teacher website, blog or wiki.

"A free Windows text-to-speech plugin for Microsoft Word It will speak the text of the document and will highlight it as it goes. It contains a talking dictionary and a text-to-mp3 converter."

Check out free online thinking tools/graphic organizers. Also explore the Online Interactive Resources. These are text heavy/dependent resources so consider how you can make them accessible to all learners. For example, use word prediction support, recreate them in a tool such as Inspiration that allows learners to add ideas in pictures, words and recordings. Or recreate the graphic organizer in another format such as an interactive whiteboard application - build in supports for success.

Text 2 Mind Map is a web application that converts texts to mind maps. It takes a structured list of words or sentences, interprets it, and draws a mind map out of them

What does this nifty little $2 app get us? The people who might get mileage out of this one will likely see the value instantly. From a purely practical standpoint as an educator, if you only create one graphic that helps to communicate an idea, then the $2 is worth the outlay. WordFoto is not Photoshop. It is not Illustrator. It only does one thing, and it does so rather simply. If you can get your image of choice into an iOS device, you can manipulate it with ease.

The Visual Thesaurus is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus which creates word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words. Its innovative display encourages exploration and learning. You'll understand language in a powerful new way.

"SpokenText lets you easily convert text into speech. Record (English, French, Spanish or German) PDF, Word, plain text, PowerPoint files, and web pages, and convert them to speech automatically. Download your reccordings as .mp3 or .m4b (Audio Book) files (in English, French, Spanish and German) of any text content on your computer or mobile phone. Record books, articles,web pages, your papers class notes or any other text content you want to have available to you in audio format. So that you can listen while you commute or exercise. It is also a great way to check your writing for grammar and spelling errors. "

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. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Interesting article. I'm not so sure that Ian Jukes, quoted liberally throughout the article, would be a big fan of RTI but I could be wrong. "Drill and kill" has been around a long time. Whether this transfers to higher level thinking is debatable. Simply providing apps that replicate drill activities we do on paper won't, in my opinion, capture students used to video game quality action - at least not for very long. The reality is classroom time is limited. If we drill students this time has to be taken from somewhere - inevitably it comes from the "real" learning time. My greatest fear of mobile technology is that it will become modern day "flash cards'. If we are going to use mobile technology, let's use it to build in support (within an exciting cross-curricular, inquiry-based classroom) such as screen readers/word prediction, and use it to provide access to apps that help students analyze, synthesize, evaluate, collaborate and create - real 21zt century fluencies. http://www.committedsardine.com/fluencies.cfm

Contains math games, video, word problems and logic puzzles in an interactive environment.

Breaks down language into words, sentences, paragraphs. Introduces students to writing with a purpose. Includes audio and visual supports.