Quick Tech Tools for Reading and Research

These are a few of my favorite web-based tools which I've been using as an ELA teacher both in my classroom to assist with reading and creation of assignments and as a teacher still working through some graduate coursework. These are great little tools to help get online reading done.

• Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader: This particular Google Chrome extension will read the webpage to you. This is great if you have a struggling reader looking at an article. It is also really helpful after a long day with 8th graders when there are long graduate level articles which need read. Either on a personal level or for you classroom. It is nifty and handy. Sometimes I let it read articles to me while I'm making dinner. Multi-tasking - it is just what teachers do.

• Diigo: This tech tool allows you to curate and annotate texts - sharing those annotations with everyone or just simply storing them for yourself. It is a great tool to teach students more about research. It has an extension for Chrome, other browsers, and even a mobile app. I use it to curate articles for students, and I use it to organize and annotate articles for myself.

• Print Friendly & PDF: This one also has an extension for Chrome, but you can also just use it in website form. It allows you to take any digital article and convert it easily for printing or download it as a PDF. The extension makes for ease of use, but this is a great way to take something and make it printable for the purposes of making hard copies or removing distractions for the purposes of differentiation.