Last week through the Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page I received a request for suggestions on apps and sites that can be used to assist students in developing their reading comprehension skills. Here’s a short list of some of the free reading comprehension skills development apps and sites that I’ve reviewed over the last year.
Rewordify is a free site that was developed by a special education teacher and former computer programmer for the purpose of helping students read complex passages. At its most basic level Rewordify takes a complex passage and rephrases it in simpler terms. Students can adjust Rewordify’s settings to match their needs. For example, students can add words to a “skip list” and those words will not be changed when they appear in a passage. Students can also use Rewordify to simply highlight difficult words instead of having them replaced. Watch the video below for a complete overview of how Rewordify works.
Reading Bear is a free service that offers narrated lessons on recognizing and pronouncing letters and words. There are also some lessons on prefixes and suffixes. Students can control the pace of each lesson to match their needs. After each lesson on Reading Bear students can take quizzes to test their skills. The quizzes present a picture and a set of words. Students have to match the correct word to the picture that they see. Through the narrator, students receive instant feedback on each question in the quiz. A five minute video overview of Reading Bear is embedded below.
Subtext is a great free iPad app that you can use to host a digital book discussion. Some of the many things that you can do with Subtext include annotating ebooks, creating quizzes about ebooks, and writing blog posts about the ebooks you read. You can create private and public book discussion groups and build bookshelves for your groups. To add books to your Subtext bookshelves you can pull from Google Books (many free ebooks are available that way), buy ebooks from Subtext (volume pricing is available), or upload your own titles (Greg Kulowiec has posted directions here). To annotate a section of a book just highlight it then choose what you want to do with it. The text that you highlight can be annotated with your messages, you can assign a quiz question to that text, or label that section as a literary element like “personification” or “foreshadowing.”
Speak It is a Google Chrome extension that enables you to have the text on most webpages read to you. With Speak It installed just highlight the text on a the page you’re viewing then right-click to activate Speak It. Then click the play button to have the text read to you. The voice is very digitized, but it is clear. Installing Speak It takes just a few seconds. To install it go to Speak It’s page in the Chrome Web Store and click the install button. Restarting your browser is not required in order to activate Speak It. If you decide that you don’t want to use Speak It any longer you can uninstall it by right-clicking on the Speak It icon in your browser and selecting uninstall.
Booktrack is an interesting service that allows you to add a soundtrack to a text. The soundtrack can be soft music or ambient noises like waves crashing. Booktrack claims that the soundtracks create a better reading environment which leads to improved reading comprehension. Booktrack offers books that you can read in your web browser and through their iPad and Android apps. Students and teachers can create and share their own booktracks through Booktrack Classroom. Registration is required in order to use all of features offered by Booktrack Classroom. Click here to take a look at some sample Booktracks.
