Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

Google started it, but other sites are running with the idea of creating a search engine built around reading levels. Twurdy (a mash-up of “too wordy”) is one of the easiest and most user-friendly sites that I have come across for searching and finding information on the web based on the concept of “readiblity.” The site, which is built on the back of Google Search, conveniently color-codes the various reading levels, and a quick click of a button allows you to match up approximate age levels with reading levels.

There are three settings that you can choose: Just Twurdy, which searches using Twurdy’s basic algorithm with medium speed and medium results; Simple Twurdy, which searches using Twurdy’s simple algorithm for fast speed but less accurate results; and Twurdy with Pop, which searches using Twurdy’s most complex algorithm which includes looking up the popularity of words within the text. It has a slower speed, but a higher level of accuracy.

For students, this means that a quick search on a topic yields web resources that are at their reading levels — I did one on the Galapagos Islands and the site was very useful. For teachers, it means that gathering resources appropriate to students’ reading levels might get a bit easier. An interesting experiment, too, is to put in the URL of a website and see what reading level is assigned to it. I did this with my own blog and it was fascinating to see the blog posts broken down by reading levels.

One drawback is that I wanted to be able to better narrow my original search field to just specific age levels (such as, all of the websites about the Galapagos Islands for a 10-year-old reading level). But overall, Twurdy was a satisfying experience and one worth considering for the classroom.

Twurdy

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BY DAN FROELICH

March 2 is Read Across America day, as well as Dr. Seuss’ birthday. While that doesn’t necessarily evoke a day filled with technology-enriched activities, it has become so thanks to the availability of web conferencing, social media, and even blogs.

Readacrossamerica.org is the central location for all events and activities related to Read Across America day. Those of you willing to make a pledge to read with your students can do so online using this year’s pledge form. Using a Google Maps interface, you can see how many pledges have been made in each state across the nation.

Schools fortunate enough to embrace social media can “Like” Read Across America on their Facebook page. There’s a Twitter conversation already in the works, a Flickr stream ready to accept photos, and a SchoolTube channel chock full of videos. It’s exciting to see an event like this evolve into so many interesting projects.

In the last couple of years, schools have even taken to Skype calls to have authors call in to a class and read to students. This is something that only a few fortunate schools in the country could afford to do in a traditional face-to-face scenario. Teachers have even buddied up with other classes to read to each other from around the country and across the globe. The Skype In Schools community recently decided to post a Read Across America page. This was something decided upon by the members of the group, and not a direction taken by the administrators of the site.

Random House has created an online gallery of resources to help direct ideas for Read Across America with the support of the National Education Association.

So what are you doing this year? Do your plans include a more technology enriched collaborative effort? If so, please share your ideas in the comments below. Happy reading!

Read Across America

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

A new term has been popping up in discussions of how to view media not only in web browsers, but also on mobile devices. A “flipboard” format is designed to be easier to navigate (particularly with your fingers on touchscreen devices such as an iPad) and easier on the eyes in terms of design elements. Surfboard is a new site that allows you to convert any standard website into a flipboard format, and the results are pretty interesting.

Surfboard is pretty easy to use. Just submit a website URL and let Surfboard convert it. I quickly converted Instructify with Surfboard, and our humble blog suddenly took on the characteristics of a magazine, with pages to flip through and a multi-article visual layout.

Surfboard runs best on the newest versions of web browsers, and my Firefox browser did not cooperate all that well. But when I moved over to Chrome, it was fine. And Surfboard suggests using Safari for the best results of all.

Surfboard

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

A rule of thumb for learning idioms is that you can’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. Just when you think a student has mastered the strange elements of idiomatic language, along comes a phrase that has your student barking up the wrong tree. Is it time to have them think outside the box? The IdiomDictionary is an online source for learning about idioms. With a simple interface, the site gives you not only the definitions, but also some historical background on the phrases and examples in a sentence.

The site claims to have more than 5,000 idiom phrases on hand for search. Certainly for second language learners, the understanding of idioms can be a struggle. But with the IdiomDictionary and a little help from the teacher, students should be able to hit the nail on the head and get a better sense of our language and its all of its quirks.

Idiom Dictionary

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BY BILL FERRIS

ZooBurst lets you build virtual pop-up books online. Through a simple WYSIWYG interface, you can upload images and enter text you want for your story, and ZooBurst handles the pop-ups and page turns virtually. Be sure to check out the Gallery to see some pretty nice-looking examples.

The controls let you manipulate the color of the pages, the angle of the pop-up images, how fast images pop, how many pages the book has, and more. ZooBurst’s 3-D virtual environment lets you see each book from every possible angle.

My only complaint with ZooBurst is that I would’ve liked to see some clip art available, as not every kid will have a lot of digital images on their computer to choose from. Yeah, I know, clip art looks cheesy. However, in an exercise like this, I think it’s more important to give kids some tools, even rudimentary ones, in order to get them busy creating something rather than combing the internet for pictures, which can be a dicey proposition in a school environment.

Overall, though, ZooBurst is a fun storytelling application with a minimal learning curve. You can put together a story and tell it to your kids during story time. Or have kids work on stories in groups or individually to exercise their creativity, and maybe produce the next classic children’s book.

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BY BILL FERRIS

What’s your bookprint? Scholastic wants readers to connect with each other based on their favorite books at their site, You Are What You Read.

At YAWYR, readers share the five books that most influenced their lives (their bookprint). After they create their bookprints, they can find other users who like the same books, and interact with them (or, in social networking parlance, “friend” them). You can also browse various celebrities’ bookprints — getting a recommendation for, say, Charlotte’s Web from Taylor Swift might carry more weight than a recommendation from you (no offense).

For more ideas on how to use YAWYR in class, there’s a teachers guide with activities like Pass it On, in which students pair up, ask questions about what books they like, and find books for each other at the library. There’s also a sample letter to parents designed to get Mom and Dad on board and support reading activities at home.

You Are What You Read

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

Cloze reading activities are pretty common in many classrooms as a way for teachers to gauge fluency and comprehension in reading. The Cloze Test Generator is an easy-to-use, free cloze reading generator with just a few bells and whistles to make things interesting.

The way the Cloze Test Generator works is you insert the text you want to use in the box, then choose what words to leave out of the final product. You can remove words based on sequence (for example, every third word), or various parts of speech, or you can use the “let me choose” option for what you want to leave out. The generator even has a “clue” option which allows a teacher to leave clues for struggling readers.

The generator can either provide the missing words in a bank, or not, based on what you want it to do. So you could generate a word list for students or leave it off. There is also an interactive component, which allows you to create the cloze activity as an online option. Students can then write the missing words onto the webpage, which also shows the correct answers with the click of a button. I could not find an option to link to a teacher-created activity, so I assume that a teacher would have to set up the page for the student at the computer.

Here is what I just wrote in my first paragraph, popped into the generator. Can you tell what I left out?

Cloze reading activities are pretty common __ many classrooms as a way ___ teachers __ test ___ fluency and comprehension ____ reading. The Cloze Test Generator is an easy-to-use–, free cloze reading generator ____ just a few bells and whistles __ make things interesting. The way the Cloze Test Generator works is you insert the text that you want __ use and then choose what words __ leave ___ __ the final product. You can remove words based __ sequence (___ example, every third word), or some parts __ speech, or you can use the “let me choose” option ___ what you want __ leave ___. The generator even has a “clue” option which allows a teacher __ leave clues ___ struggling readers.

(answer: prepositions).

Cloze Test Generator

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BY BILL FERRIS

Google’s advanced search function lets you filter search results by reading level. Simply click the “Advanced Search” link next to the search bar on the Google home page (or directly underneath the search box on any search results page). In the “Need more tools?” section, you can tell Google to only return results within your reading level of choice (basic, intermediate, or advanced). Google will also give you a graph that breaks down the percentage of results that fall into each reading level.

This is a handy tool for elementary students. It’s also useful for folks who want to research a super-advanced topic they know nothing about, and want to find resources written in plain English.

How it works:

“The feature is based primarily on statistical models we built with the help of teachers. We paid teachers to classify pages for different reading levels, and then took their classifications to build a statistical model. With this model, we can compare the words on any webpage with the words in the model to classify reading levels. We also use data from Google Scholar, since most of the articles in Scholar are advanced.”

Since language isn’t always compatible with statistical models, you’ll want to use your own judgment when determining the reading levels of the results you get. Still, filtering by reading level may be a good way to make sure you and your students get the search results that are most helpful to you.

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BY BILL FERRIS

If you ask nicely (and if you’re a teacher or librarian), science-fiction author Cory Doctorow will send you a free copy of With a Little Help, his new collection of short stories.

If you’re not familiar with his work, Doctorow is an editor of Boing Boing, as well as a thought leader on copyright reform and Creative Commons — for years he’s licensed his books under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, meaning you can freely download, remix, share, and adapt his books as much as you want on a noncommercial basis.

Since so many teachers sweat copyright issues in the classroom, you may want to start with Doctorow’s Content (also available for free via Creative Commons), his in-depth look at his thoughts on copyright in the 21st century.

Get a free copy (libraries, schools)

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

Imagine, if you will, that you are beside me as I peer over the shoulder of my twelve-year-old son. He’s using a web browser to search for an article on creating stop-motion movies, which is one of his hobbies. I barely have time to say, “That looks interesting,” before he has clicked on a hyperlink and is off on entirely different page. A video catches his eye and he ignores me completely as he hits the “play” button, only to discover the video is a commercial for an upcoming movie. I want to say something, but I don’t have time. The mouse works its magic, and he is off again, this time in full reverse, clicking on arrows that direct him back to the original page. I keep silent now, watching him scan the article for the headlines in bold. Then he is following yet another link to yet another page.

And so it goes.

If you are a teacher or parent who revels in the deep reading of novels or articles, with discussions and contemplations of character development and plot design, this kind of “reading” is enough to drive you to the brink of despair. In fact, the question of whether this kind of activity is even “reading” is one worth asking. We traditionally think of reading in terms of sounding out words, understanding the meaning of those words, and putting those words into some contextual understanding.

And yet, if you read The National Council of Teachers of English’s definition of reading, you’ll recognize some semblance of what my son was doing, even as he jumped here and there with the mouse:

Readers read for different purposes. Sometimes they read for pleasure. Sometimes they read for information. Their reason for reading impacts the way they read. They may skim or read carefully depending on why they are reading. Throughout this process, readers monitor the meaning they are constructing. When the text does not meet their purposes, they may switch to another text. Readers expect what they are reading to make sense. They use a repertoire of strategies, such as rethinking, re-reading or reading on to clarify ideas, to make sure they understand what they read in order to accomplish their purposes.¹

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

What? You don’t have time to read an entire book? You’re too busy with your computer or your cell phone or your mobile device? DailyLit adds a little bit of literature to your day by sending you small, readable sections of ebooks. The site promises that the reading installments will take about five minutes, and the reader sets the time and method of delivery of the text (either email or RSS feed). Instead of you going to the books, the books are coming to you.

DailyLit has more than 1,000 classic books that mostly seem to be free ebooks you can find in other places, too. You won’t find The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, for example, but you will find a collection of humor stories from the 1920s, a book about architecture from Frank Lloyd Wright, and children’s stories ranging from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. There are multiple ways to search the site, such as by category, by name, and even by word cloud.

In the classroom

If you have an interactive whiteboard, you could post the small daily excerpts of stories first thing in the morning and let students follow the tale day by day. Given the size of the text, that could last an entire year. If you do read-aloud activities with your students, the daily sections might make for a manageable reading to start off class. Or, if you have high school students, you could encourage them to sign up at the site to receive their own stories on their mobile devices, and get them reading in the environment they feel most comfortable with.

DailyLit

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

It’s probably fair to say that “grammar” and “comics” are not often words spoken together in a typical classroom. Comics still get a pretty bum rap these days, even though more and more educators are seeing the value in alternative literacies such as graphic novels and comics. To understand the wealth of thinking that goes into a comic (both as a writer and as a reader), Blambot has created a chart of “Comics Grammar.”

While the site frames the discussion around fonts and design,  there is plenty to learn from here about how to read comics. You learn about balloon tails, double dashes, emanating dialogue, and more. What emerges is the use of the visual in connection with the written word, and the combination of these forms almost a literacy of its own when it comes to comics and graphic novels.

In the Classroom

Do you let your students make comics? How about read comics? This site could be a valuable resource around reading skills that are not traditionally taught, and I bet that your students would have fun with it, too. Keep an eye out for the annual Free Comic Day each May, and head down to the local comic book shop to grab free comics that you can use in the classroom. Analyzing comics as text and visual information can be a way to engage non-traditional readers and learners in a new way, and making literacy visible is always a rewarding experience.

Comic Book Grammar and Tradition via Blambot Comic Fonts and Lettering

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Often when we ask students to read, we want them to pick out key words or organize the text into categories. VocabGrabber is a powerful tool that helps do just that: organize, analyze, and understand a reading.

Simply paste the text and click the button marked (you guessed it) “Grab Vocabulary!” This generates a word cloud of the most frequently used terms. Clicking a word shows its definition and an example of how it’s used in the passage.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

The origins of words and phrases from the English Language gets a nice twist with Etymologic, a fun online quiz that can be difficult to master. The site consists of a series of questions with two to four possible answers, most of which seems plausible. You have to show an uncanny knowledge of English (or be incredibly lucky with your educated guesses) to get all the questions correct.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say most people now understand there is a wealth of valuable and interesting videos on YouTube. Of course, there is a wealth of not-so-great content, too, and often the good and the bad sit next to each other. Kideo Player is a website that showcases fun and educational videos for very young viewers by filtering out content inappropriate for young eyes.

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