September 27, 2014
One of the key concerns I often hear primary teachers vociferate revolves around the potential of technology in enhancing students reading comprehension skills. As a matter of fact, technology's role in this regard is phenomenal and there are now several web tools and mobile apps that are designed specifically for the improvement of students reading skills. These tools make use of a variety of activities and exercises all of which are geared towards providing students with meaningful practice in areas related to reading comprehension. Here are some of the key tools I would recommend to use with your kids and students to improve their reading comprehension skills.
2-Rewordify
Rewordify lets you read more, understand more, learn more words, and teach more effectively. It simplifies English, teaches vocabulary, creates learning materials, and lets you create documents to teach a global audience. It has many more features, and it's all free.
3- SpeakIt
SpeakIt reads selected text using Text-to-Speech technology with language auto-detection. It can read text in more than 50 languages.
This is how to use SpeakIt:
- First select the text you want it to read.
- Then click the icon to start listening.
- When it is ready to read, the number of sentences is shown on the icon.
- To stop listening at any time click pause
Reading Bear is a great tool for helping kids learn to read. Reading Bear integrates both vocabulary practice (over 1200 vocabulary items) and phonetic awareness ( covering different phonetic principles and patterns of written English) into their lessons. All of these lessons are provided in the form of narrated presentations playable either as a video or as an interactive slide show. Presentations are available in seven different versions. In the fullest version, the narrator sounds out a word slowly and quickly, then blend it slowly, and finally (after an optional prompt) blend it quickly. As sounds are pronounced, the corresponding letters are highlighted. Then a picture is displayed illustrating the word, show a sentence (with the individual sounds again highlighted, karaoke style), and finally show a video illustrating the sentence.
4- Read with Me
Read with Me is a web platform that for monitoring oral reading progress on any web device. It provides students with practice fluency at home on any web device and to keep track of miscues. They can also use it to record and listen to their own reading.
5- Language Garden
Language Garden is a treasure trove of materials and resources on teaching language literacy. Using Language Garden , students will be able to learn about language plants, read and listen to narrated stories, and compose their own language plants.
