Friday, January 8, 2016

Rewordify: Adjust Lexile Levels, Study Vocabulary

From:  Mrs Water's English:  A Middle School ELA and Education Review Blog 
#EdTechELA
As part of my research for a news article unit I’m designing, I discovered Rewordify, an online lexile adjusting tool that will revolutionize your vocabulary instruction. You or your students can use it to make any text easier to read. Did I mention it’s completely free?
The site is called Rewordify and all you have to do is find some text somewhere online (or even on your computer), paste it into the yellow box on the website, and hit the Rewordify Text button. The site will return your  text with the hard words replaced with highlighted easier words. It’s really that simple. You can then paste that text into a Google Doc, or other text editor to print for your students.
You can also adjust the difficulty level of the reworded articles in the settings section. While you can’t set a specific lexile level, you can adjust the difficulty of the words that the tool rewords.
Additionally you can add student accounts (No email address required!) through the Educator Central section of the website and have them complete this process with articles they find online. Update: Students can even enter a website address into the yellow box and rewordify will make the entire website easier to read! Take a look at my Rewordified website.
Once the site has returned your students’ text, they can click on the easier highlighted words, and a popup box will display the original term and a definition. They’ll have the option to add the word to a list that they can study later. Using a computer and headphones, students can study the words by listening to them, taking a very short quiz, and practicing using the words. 
I tested the study tools, and I think they’re probably best geared towards the ‘upper elementary to middle school level students. That said, the Rewordify tool itself would significantly help high school students who need to work on their vocabulary. I’d recommend instructing students to find newspaper article of interest to them, then using the rewordify tool to learn the words they don’t know yet.
Learn more about how to start using this tool here:
Or just watch the following video…

No comments:

Post a Comment