Last night I attended the Blended Learning with Read&Write webinar. A great tool to help all our students. Not just students with learning needs but also gifted students. The tool seems easy enough for our students to use and has multitude possibilities.
Read&Write Features include:
Text to Speech
Simplify
Practice Reading Aloud
Vocabulary Builder
Voice Note
OrbitNote PDF Reader
Editing Tools
What stood out for me:
Read&Write will assist students with reading different types of text and with Simplify you can reduce text to make it shorter or less daunting for the students. Also, students will be able to gain access to all learning without the help of a teacher. This made me think of T-Shape Literacy and how one of the barriers was that not all students can access written text. This would be a great tool to use in conjunction with that, especially as students will be able to listen to information on a PDF format read to them.
Another cool feature was the highlighting and creating a word bank. I've always wanted to create a personal dictionary for my students, but to keep a handwritten dictionary is not sustainable in a busy class, it's something that slips through the cracks. WIth this tool, it would be so easy to have one and students can build their vocabulary bank.
And the last feature that caught my eye was the editing tool that helps students with proofreading and editing before submitting. This will ensure that when we have our learning conversations with our students, we will spend more time on the deeper features of their text instead of focussing on surface features such as punctuation and capitalization.
I'm hoping that we can provide this tool all our students so that students have more authority over their work in a blended learning environment. Moving towards independence and success.
I also did this course, I agree the vocab list are a great tool, be fantastic for an independent activity as a part of our sharp reading or writing programmes. In my blog I said I felt read&write would only be successful if all the kaiako in the studio are on board, I wonder if you would agree with this statement? I am looking forward to see if this is a tool we pick up next year and how we can effectively use it in our studio.
ReplyDeleteYes I agree, all kaiako should be on board as it needs to become a tool that we constantly refer too. It should also be available to all students. Then it becomes part of our class culture. Yes I got excited during the webinar as I didn't realise how much you could do with the tool.
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