Customize your reading level with ReWordify and Newsela.

This week we are looking at some tools that enable you to offer online reading text to your students at a number of reading levels. Often the challenge with online activities is how to differentiate online content for different audiences with differing reading ability.

One tool that allows for different reading levels is Newsela (http://www.newsela.com) which offers current affairs and selected historical narratives that allow you to choose a Lexile (Reading level) This tool has a free version which is sufficient for many teachers purposes and a paid pro version that adds some teacher friendly features for those who want to use it on a daily basis.

For our purposes just browse to Newsela.com and drill down to a story and you can see the story from 1240L down to 570L in both English and Spanish!

Here is the same story at 570L.

While Newsela is great for non-fiction reading, what about fiction and other reading materials that you would like to simplify for your students. One nice tool that comes in handy here is ReWordify (http://www.rewordify.com) you can copy and paste any passage of text and it will use its built in rewordify engine to recognize and intelligently replace over 58,000 difficult words and phrases based on how they are used in context.

This rather difficult to read text

becomes

So think outside the box and find ways that you can use tools like this to bring richer reading materials to your students.

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