Listen Up for Reading Help

Dyslexia not only is frustrating for students, but for teachers who lack the resources to guide these students to fluent reading. Listening is a great technique. Listening to books being read on an iPhone, iPod or iPad, that is. Nonprofit organization Learning Ally can help with a new version of its Audio reading program.  Learning Ally now allows direct downloading of content and the software has bookmarking (both for memorable and hard to follow passages), the ability to return to the last-read place. My favorite is that the software can speed up and slow down the reading so that the student can get the most out of it. The organization has a library of 70,000 volumes and teaching resources. Learning Ally is free for those with version 1.0 and 1.1 of the app and it costs $20 for others. The service costs $99 a year.

Reading on the Web

What’s better than a reading program that can run on PCs or Macs? How about one that is distributed over the Web so that it runs on every computer that a school owns, from a notebook to an Android tablet. The latest version of Scientific Learning’s Reading Assistant lets students log on and practice reading to develop their comprehension by reading passages into the service’s speech recognition engine, which provides feedback.

Freebee Friday: Software Plus Books

Scholastic, the corporate parent of Tech Tools, is getting into the eBook market with its Storia software. The program includes access to more than 1,000 books already published and many more on the way, including such classics as “Clifford the Big Red Dog." The software runs on PCs and an iPad version is in the works. Storia can not only read and highlight passages to the student, but also comes with interactive elements, quizzes and a visual way to organize a schoolroom worth of virtual books. Storia downloads come with 5 free books.

 

Freebee Friday: The Reader

Sometimes all a struggling reader needs is to have a passage read to him before he gives it a try on his own. That’s exactly what NaturalReader does by turning text on the screen into a natural sounding voice. It works with PCs and Macs and can has a handy tool bar for speeding it up or slowing it down. The software can read an entire book or just a paragraph or sentence and has the choice of different voices. The trial version is free.

 

Check out That eBook

Rather than buying ebooks for students and teachers to use as needed, eBook Fling lets your school buy a subscription, allowing readers to take out as many as 12 for $20 as compared to between $10 and $15 each. There are books, magazines and newspapers available, and can be read on a variety of devices.

 

 

FETC 2012: Read Along

If putting early reader books in front of children and hoping for the best isn’t working, Scientific Learning’s Reading Assistant takes this to a new level by highlighting the word while it reads the passage to the student before she tries it herself. After silently reading the passage, the student records a reading as the program corrects any words that are misspoken. Finally, the student takes a content quiz, and the program compiles the class’s scores.

 

 

FECT 2012: To Be or Not To Be

Having trouble getting an English class through Macbeth? Mind Connex has created cartoon versions of the Bard’s most famous plays that are faithful to Shakespeare but easier for kids to swallow. The company has finished three plays and is working on Hamlet; each comes with a study guide. The plays can be watched on Macs, PCs or iPads for $15; the company has discounted pricing for a site license.

 

Online Geometry Help

Got kids struggling to understand the concepts of geometry? It is a different way of looking at math, but Revolution K12 has an online geometry course that can figure out what isn’t clicking in the student’s brain and remedy the situation with specific online tutorials. The course has 28 sections on subjects ranging from polygons to ratios, each of which has pre- and post-lesson tests and are followed up with Mentor Sessions where the student is asked key questions about the material. 

 

 

Freebee Friday: Practice Really Makes Perfect

One thing all teachers can agree on is that early readers need to practice their newly acquired skill to make it stick. The English for Children Web site has hundreds upon hundreds of reading passages, from bite sized paragraphs and picture books for second graders to short stories for older kids. Most have vocabulary lists with definitions, fill-in exercises, crosswords and a cool type what you hear passage that’s especially good for ESL learners.

 

 

Reading, the Digital Way

The library is not an endangered species quite yet, but Capstone Digital’s MyOn Reader can augment a collection's physical volumes. The program is an all-digital clearinghouse with more than 1,000 digital texts that teachers can build custom curricula for students. It provides unlimited anytime access to interactive material with printed text, audio and an embedded dictionary. It’s all correlated to state educational standards with book-based quizzes as well as overall assessment tests.