4 Powerful Chrome Apps to Enhance Your Reading Experience

May 24, 2015
Here some very good Chrome apps to help you enhance your online reading experience. The extensions we curated for you today allow you to create a comfortable reading environment where you can enjoy your reading with no distractions and no eye strain. Using these apps will enable you to eliminate  ads and flash animations from your page, browse multi-page articles in one, seamless view, disable surrounding webpage noise and clutter and many more.  Check out the list below and share with us what you think of it.

1- Readability

“Readability is a web and mobile app that zaps clutter and saves web articles in a comfortable reading view. The official Readability extension for Chrome provides a better way to read online, turning any web page into a comfortable reading view right in your web browser.”

2- Clearly

“With one click, Clearly makes blog posts and articles clean and easy to read. Clearly eliminates all distractions from your online reading experience, and even allows you to browse multi-page articles in one, seamless view.”

3- Read Mode

“Just click on the glasses icon in the address bar, the current page will turn into a nice-to-read black on white page allowing you to read without forcing your eyes. Ads and Flash animations are also removed while on read-mode. Click the icon again and everything will go back to normal.”

4- Easy Reader

“EasyReader can customize and improve the readability of long web articles
Make any article or part of a website more readable!’

Follow us on : Twitter, Facebook , Google plus, Pinterest .

Two Very Good Apps to Enhance Students Reading Skills

March, 2015
Below are two good Chrome apps to help students improve their reading skills. The apps provide reading practice using passages specifically designed to challenge learners reading abilities. Students will have access to a variety of built-in tools to assist them with listening to and practicing reading passages.And in the case of Fluency Tutor, they can even record entire passages and listen to themselves reading them aloud.

1- Read & Write for Google

Read&Write for Google™ offers a range of powerful support tools to help students gain confidence with reading and writing, including:

•  Hear words, passages, or whole documents read aloud with easy-to-follow dual color highlighting
• See the meaning of words explained with text and picture dictionaries
• Hear text translated into other languages
• Get suggestions for the current or next word as you type
• Turn words into text as you speak 
• Highlight text in documents or the web and collect for use in other documents
•  Simplify and summarize text on web pages

2- Fluency Tutor

This is an app we learned from EdTech Guy. This is a web-based program allows students to open Fluency Tutor™ for Google reading passages in Google Drive.Some of its features include:
Allows students to open reading passages via Google Drive.
Provides support tools to assist students when listening to and practicing reading passages.
Allows students to record passages and listen to themselves reading aloud.

 Follow us on : Twitter, Facebook , Google plus, Pinterest .

A Good Tool for Reading and Summarizing Long Articles

March 9, 2015
Not having enough time to read a long article? Too LongDidn’t Read (TLDR) does the job for you and provides you with a condensed summary of the main ideas of the article. We have installed the app and tried it on few articles and it appears to work perfectly.

TLDR analyzes the content of the article and creates a synopsis of it. You can also highlight text to be TLDR’ed for use with comments or on social media. We have checked user reviews in the Chrome web store and noticed several people gave it good ratings. We thought you may want to give it a try and see if it works for you. Watch the video below to learn more about Too Long Didn’t Read app.

 Follow us on : Twitter, Facebook , Google plus, Pinterest .

A Beautiful Visual on Reading Tips to Use with Students

January 8, 2015
Here is a very good read shared by Edutopia on their Facebook page.’5 Tips for Helping A Student Read” is an article written by Rebecca Alber in which she shared some interesting insights on how  to get your students to love reading by helping them make the best of their reading choices. Next time you want to assign a reading task to your students, keep in mind and reflect on the following:What do you know about your kids’ reading interests and likes? Assess past reading experiences of your students and identify what worked and what did not work.

The visual below created by @Worldlib sums up the 5 reading tips to help students find good books. You can also read the full article with more details on each of these tips from this Link.

Source of the visual: http://goo.gl/3Dj0Lv

Follow us on : Twitter, Facebook , Google plus, Pinterest .