Read&Write -

 I've had Read&Write hanging out on my browser for quite a while now (it's free for educators) and more recently our school got funding to install it on all of our students' chromebooks (it's the little purple puzzle piece with 'rw' inside it). As far as I'm aware it gets little use. 

I attended a webinar for parents yesterday run by Ben Dyer at Texthelp and was reminded what an amazing tool it is and how it can support our students.

We can use it to increase reading accuracy, improve comprehension, improve vocabulary and improve writing quality and quantity. You can use Read&Write with google docs, PDFs and websites. You can even use it if you have a screenshot of some text - it can work on the text within the image.

Some reading tools Ben shared:

Text to speech  (the play button) - this reads the text on the page to you - either highlighted text, the whole doc or text you have masked with the masking tool. This will assist many of our students access online learning - if they're able to listen they can access content above their reading level and focus on comprehension.

To support comprehension there are dictionary tools - images as well as text.

It can also create a vocabulary list - I highlighted words in the doc, clicked on the vocab list button (the one that looks like bullet points) and it creates a new doc like the example below.  There's also a translate tool so users may translate the word to their home language.

 

Another fabulous feature is that Read&Write can simplify websites - removing all the 'visual noise' so the text can be read more easily. Once you are viewing the cleaner text - as in image - you can turn on the discover tool. This will identify any potentially new/problematic vocabulary and if you hover over the underlined text - it will show you the definition and an image (which of course I could have read to me using text to speech). 

Writing:

Predictive Text - AI technology predicts the top 10 words you may want to use next - and voice typing - Have a play with these - you can see how it might motivate and support reluctant writers.

Voice Notes - you can record a voice note of up to a minute and insert it as a comment in a doc - amazing way for a teacher to provide feedback or for a student to record their questions etc. Ben showed how some students had questions to answer and had recorded their answers as a voice note and inserted that.

Research - You can use the highlighting tools to highlight key info and there is a summarising tool as well that collects the highlights and puts them into a new doc (with a bibliography - referencing is a good habit to teach our children).

You can customise how the tools are presented to children by clicking on the  'more' button [...] and going to features - you can click on what you want presented in the tool bar - some children might prefer a simpler tool bar.

Such a great tool - I really encourage our Totara teachers to explore it. There are helpful resources here

Webinars are available here - if they've already happened, you still just register and then it will share a recording with you. 

I highly recommend learning more about this tool. It would be great see it used more and I will be interested to see the creative ways our teachers and students at Park Estate utilise Read&Write to support  learning and achievement.