The Front Lawn
Saving the World through Educational TechnologyArchive for Evaluations
Read & Write from Text Help Systems
We are all ELL and Learning Support teachers to some degree these days, but if you teach these subjects full-time there is a piece of software you may find yourself going to as much as your word processor or browser. It is called Read &Write Gold, and it has the right balance of affordability and ease of use to get your learning support or ELL team on board without much fuss. But is it’s feature set enough to make it a mainstream tool?
Read Write 8 is, at its core, a productivity tool for your most challenged of students. It’s essential feature is its text recognition and narration capability, but there’s much more than that. The narration feature isn’t any more exciting than the utility of the same name built into Windows, but you do have more control over what gets read aloud. I had never thought about how useful this might be to ELL students until a colleague explained how difficult it is to gain access to a native English speaker outside of school. These students would benefit greatly from hearing coursework repeated back to them in proper English whenever and wherever they want.
Other features that sparked interest were the homophone tools which include the ability to highlight all the homophones in a block of text and browse for their sound-alikes. Homophone errors are a common source of frustration for English language learners. This feature alone represents a dozen built-in lesson plans.
Other fancy tools include summarizing a block of text, which seems like quite a useful tool on the surface, but considering the complexity of determining semantics, left me a bit skeptical. What it claims to do is summarize any text you place in a text editor down to a degree of abstraction ranging from 1% to 100%. In test, it faired well at the 75%, passable at 50%, but completely lost the point at 25% or below. See the attached examples to judge for yourself. summary-test
Other study tools include highlighter features that have some interesting implications for teaching writing and supporting study skills for all students. For example, if you highlight several non-adjacent sentences in the same color, you can collect them all together in a new word document with the click of a button. It’s analogous to copy-paste, but again, more accessible to learning support students. This may in fact be the tool I’ve bee looking for to help English teachers tackle nominalization in their lessons.
All in all this series of literacy tools has a solid array of features, that, for the price, can’t be beat in the educational sector. And if none of these features seem very useful to you, there is always the ability to use the predictivve word generator to create an original poem, as a colleague of mine did during our training.
project will become a major part in a residential
project is to stay away across a major influence of a political and military
project aims and plans of their respective
project has pointed at least twenty years later the island is a case to the sea at a given the right hemisphere
promises to stay with the older man who is the primary and military project is the size of their most famous for his father died of a legal right back of a political parties in their area under which it will all over his shoulder
problem is to stay in their area of the roof was better chance that a child of a decision is the size and
projects in their hands and projects in the light of a surprise at least since all had been all had offered me that a change of the word in a residential project is to some extent in the execution of British Architects
proponents of lung cancer of British Nuclear Fuels
processes involved with special educational needs and military project aims to help keep away from their respective project
- Read & Write 8 (attributable to Stephanie Hepner)
