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Rewordify
Pros: Quick and easy to adapt text to various levels of complexity with high levels of customization.
Cons: The old-school interface could organize info better.
Bottom Line: This utilitarian differentiation tool is useful enough to be in every teacher's toolbox.
Teachers can use the website to scaffold reading tasks. Using its tiered model, teachers can enhance students' comprehension by offering a variety of levels of the same text. The Learning Activities (which accompany each text) can be used to build vocabulary and track mastery data with students -- although these activities are typical worksheet-style learning. A more powerful use of the tool would be to put students in the driver's seat. Introduce students to Rewordify (either as a site or as a bookmarklet for their browser), and let them import text they'd like to read and customize the options to support their own needs. Teachers should, however, be wary of students relying too heavily on this tool at the expense of developing their own decoding skills. Teachers might also encourage students to try out the Learning Sessions when reading leveled text to learn new words.
Teachers should also take note of Rewordify's Educator Walkthrough as well as the printable Getting Started resources.
Rewordify is a free reading and vocabulary tool for building reading fluency and vocabulary. Rewordify's main feature is its automatic simplification of texts. Users import text by pasting it into the website or using a browser bookmarklet. Once the text is imported, it can be customized to make reading more accessible to a variety of learners. The website uses a computer-based natural language processing system to simplify the text while maintaining the meaning. The reading level can be changed at any time and aligns well with Lexile reading measures. Four styles of word substitution are available, including changing words into less complex vocabulary, providing clickable links on challenging words to see substitutions, and a two-column display with unaltered text next to the simplified version. In addition to simplifying the text, users can quickly create a variety of learning activities (available as printables) such as matching quizzes, cloze reading passages, and vocabulary lists. The site offers audio support, reading words to users, and creating audio learning activities. Teachers can create a virtual library of the text they are using that can be kept private or shared with the Rewordify community. Open-source literary texts, such as Frankenstein, are also readily available.
One of the highlights of the website is how well it adapts to and charts student learning. Using student accounts, teachers can track how well students are mastering vocabulary. As students learn new words, Rewordify will no longer provide substitutions, slowly raising the text complexity for individual learners.
Rewordify is a dependable resource for learning, with highly useful tools for differentiation and building students' reading fluency and comprehension. While it's not the most modern tool in terms of design and user onboarding, it's still easy enough to figure out, and busy teachers will appreciate how it helps them quickly differentiate texts and build worksheets (although these worksheets aren't the most pedagogically innovative). If teachers really dig in and have students create accounts, the site's data collection and tracking provide clear evidence of its efficacy. One potential pitfall of Rewordify, however, is its reliance on a computer algorithm to simplify text. While the algorithm seems to do a good job, some of the nuance and deeper meaning can be lost by letting a computer take on the job of carefully crafting classroom readings. Teachers should work closely with students to make sure these aspects of readings aren't lost when students level their texts.
Learning Rating
Community Rating
Great for younger students, more difficult to execute with high school students
For middle school students, who are still reading primarily novels within the English curriculum, Rewordify is truly a benefit. Its algorithm underscores difficult vocabulary words and surely aids reading comprehension. However, from my use, the algorithm concerning high school level reading material truly leaves something to be desired. Words are replaced with definitions that make reading awkward and sometimes even more difficult than the original text. The technology, then, becomes something distracting rather than beneficial to learning. Moreover, it would be better if the website had some sort of scanning feature for documents and readings. For particularly dense texts, I cannot imagine requiring my students to type in the entire text when they are struggling to ascertain its meaning. As mentioned in the "How I Use It" section, the website could also be improved dramatically so that students can navigate it easily. It is a great starting point to a problem that needs to be addressed in the classroom, yet it surely has its flaws.
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