Dream It
Newsela is a great option to bring readings to a more accurate level for my students. Newsela has current event articles that can be shifted to meet different lexile levels in students. (Screenshot examples of article in different lexiles). By using current event articles students will be able to relate the content of what we are learning to a larger scope. Newsela allows the teacher to print the news articles so they can be used in the classroom. Newsela is a website that gathers news articles and classifies them at the appropriate grade level. The big advantage of Newsela is you can adjust the reading level to fit your students ability.
Therefore, each student can be reading at their grade level, but the whole class can be learning the same concepts. Newsela even changes the title and word count or each article to allow the students to fully understand every aspect of the content.
Click on the images below to see the article in its entirety.
Rewordify was another option that I experimented with. Rewordify allows the user to insert text and identifies text that is difficult for students. With Rewordify the user has to enter the text and the text is highlighted to show “hard” words. The hard words are defined and even pronounced for the user. This is very helpful to increase reading comprehension but putting together all of the material to be entered is a daunting task. My other issue with rewordify was the science content was sometimes lost in the words that were changed. For example, the text that was used for readability was placed into rewordify and the output changed velocity to speed. The final sentence read, "The speed of an object is the speed of an object and the direction of its motion."
Kaplan, K. (2014, June 6). Clever koalas hug trees to stay cool in hot
weather, scientists say. Los Angeles Times.
Newsela. (n.d.). Retrieved July 21, 2014, from Newsela website:
Rewordify. (n.d.). Retrieved July 21, 2014, from Rewordify website:
