Differentiate Classroom Readings with Rewordify

One of my biggest challenges in the past has been dealing with the many different reading abilities of students in one class. When I would give struggling readers a difficult reading and they saw a word they did not understand, immediately I would lose their attention. Earlier, I wrote about using Google to search by reading level to find different leveled texts, which is one solution to this challenge. Rewordify is also a web 2.0 tool that can help.

Basically, Rewordify takes any digital text and replaces difficult words and phrases with content that is easier to understand. It look like a great tool to help students break down difficult readings.

The site is extremely user friendly. Simply copy and paste text from a word document, pdf, website, or any other digital text into the site and hit “Rewordify text.” You can also copy and paste the url of a website into rewordify. Rewordify analyzes the text and creates a simplified version with difficult phrases and words highlighted and defined.

Before analyzing the document, you have the ability to select the difficulty level of the modified text. (The site uses the Brigham Young University 450-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English to determine the difficulty of the modified reading.) Below are the six reading difficulties you can choose from:

• Easiest: Reword as many words as possible to the simplest possible replacements.
• Level 1: Reword almost all hard words. 
• Level 2: Reword the top 80% of hard words. 
• Level 3: Reword the top 60% of hard words. 
• Level 4: Reword the top 40% of hard words. 
• Hardest: Reword only the hardest words. 

Potentially, you can have students all reading the same text but with 6 different levels of complexity.

Watch the video below to learn more.

Rewordify also have many different public domain books and news websites already analyzed and ready to use in the classroom.

In addition to changing the text complexity, Rewordify will create definition lists, matching sheets, flashcards, vocabulary quizzes, word bank activities, and cloze activities.

Give Rewordify a try in class and leave a comment in the section below on what you think.

ICE 2014 - A Tech Guy's Dream

ICE 2014 is in the books and it was an amazing experience! ICE is a lot of tech nerds like myself getting together and sharing practical classroom examples of educational technology integration. I was able to attend a variety of sessions such as Differentiation in a 1:1 Classroom, 1:1 Technology Learn Today Use Tomorrow, Teaching Tough Math Topics with Technology, and Flipping Professional Development. Feel free to checkout any of my notes and shot me an email if you need clarification. Here are some of the highlights from my sessions:

The session on differentiation in a 1:1 classroom was lead by Kristen Olsen and Megan Ryder, instructional coaches from Downers Grove District 58.

• We discussed the concept of “Sandbox Time” to introduce students to new technology tools in the classroom. Instead of taking time to demo a new tool give students 5 minutes to play around with the tool and teach each other. This also gives students the time to "get the giggles out" when playing with a new tool. You might get some resistance at first from students but overtime they have found this to be a productive way to introduce new tools in class. 
• They have found a lot of success in giving students autonomy as a way to differentiate in class. The first example they provided was an iPad Menu or bingo card, where students choose three activities to make bingo. Here is a similar example but for a high school spanish class.
• They are currently working on using Google Forms to create choose your own adventures. By using the Google Form Page Breaks, students are taken to different questions based on their answers to the previous questions.
• TeenTribune was another great site shared during this session. This site allows teachers to differentiate by selecting grade level specific news stories as well as stories in spanish. Students can post comments, with all comments moderated by their teachers before they are published. There are also critical thinking questions and quizzes at the end of many of the articles.
• Learn Zillion and Ten Marks are both free sites that help differentiate math curriculum.
• Finally, they described how they set up a differentiated lesson. At the end of a class, they will have students fill out a google form as an exit ticket. They use that data to place students into groups for the next day. The next day’s instruction is based on whole class, group work, and individual practice. Here is an example for a differentiated math class.

1:1 Technology Learn Today Use Tomorrow was another great session I attended. It was led by Jim Rowley, Michael Lezon, Christa Morgan, and Ginger Shelato from Rochester Illinois. In this session I was introduced to the following tools, which all looked intriguing.

• Online Newspapers is a great site that has newspapers from every country in the world. This site looks great for a social studies, english, or world language course.
• Actively Learn is a site that can help students comprehend difficult readings. Teachers are able to embed questions directly into any book in the public domain, any web article, or PDF. The free version of the site also offers 150 commonly taught books with questions already embedded that teachers are able to modify. Teachers can then track student progress as they work their way through the text. Actively Learn looks like a great way to efficiently administer formative assessments as students work their way through difficult readings.
• Illustrative Mathematics is a useful site for math teachers. This site creates word problems for algebra, functions, geometry, statistics and probability, and number and quantity courses.

One of the last sessions I went to was Teaching Tough Math Topics with Technology by Greg Tang and Tammy Worcester.

• The main theme of Greg and Tammy’s presentation was to get students thinking in patterns to help them learn math. They developed a six step process to help students attack any word problem they come across. 
• They also developed Kakooma to help students think in mathematical patterns. Think of Kakooma as mathematical pushups for students. They recommended that students play kakooma for a little each week. To spice up KaKooma, they have their students compete against each other and enter their scores into a Google Form. The high score at the end of a period wins! Here is one teacher's perspective on using Greg Tang's math games in class.
• Greg and Tammy also use self grading quizzes to efficiently give students formative assessments throughout a unit.
• National Library of Virtual Manipulatives is a site they have used to teach difficult math topics.
• Hooda Math is a search engine for math games. These games can be great anchor activities for a differentiated math classroom.

Hopefully everyone can benefit from my time at ICE and get at least one idea to take back to their classroom. Enjoy!