Rewordify- a Whiz-Bang technology tool you must have!

I’ve been using Rewordify with my students for the past 4 years in my job as a high school resource room teacher. I try and use tech tools that can help level the playing field for challenged learners. It is overwhelming when I am trying to differentiate reading material because there are just so many words that I have to address in each passage.

I found rewordify at rewordify.com . It is FREE! It is available to all my students. It is easy to use for them and easy for them to bookmark and use independently! It is a tech tool that once it has been introduced to a student, it is one thing they remember to ask for and use.

Basically, Rewordify takes a passage, an article, a webpage or a book and can sift through the vocabulary and whiz-bang produce a passage with understandable vocabulary with the same meaning.

Here is a passage I entered into the home page from a NOAA website.

http://estuaries.noaa.gov/About/Default.aspx?ID=213

Rewordified:

An river is the thin zone along a (land next to a body of water) (such as bays, lagoons, sounds orsheds (skin, etc.)) where freshwater systems and rivers meet, and mix with a salty ocean,becoming partly salty.

Sometimes, freshwater from rivers mixes with large freshwater bodies creating a "freshwaterriver" that functions like a typical partly salty rivers.

The five major types of rivers are coastal plain, bar-built, delta system, (related to Earth's surface plate movement), and fjords.

Rivers are (like nothing else in the world) places that are valuable to (the health of the Earth/the surrounding conditions) and to (community of people/all good people in the world).

Original passage:

An estuary is the thin zone along a coastline (such as bays, lagoons, sounds or sloughs) where freshwater systems and rivers meet, and mix with a salty ocean, becoming brackish.

Sometimes, freshwater from rivers mixes with large freshwater bodies creating a "freshwater estuary" that functions like a typical brackish estuaries.

The five major types of estuaries are coastal plain, bar-built, delta system, tectonic, and fjords.

Estuaries are unique places that are valuable to the environment and to society.   

But that is not all! There are features that extend the learning beyond the passage!

I can get a read out of the statistics about words per sentence, letters per word, and much more.This image shows some of the great features. My favorites are the rewordified text, Cloze activity and the answer key! Use this link for a larger clearer image.

This next image is a shout out to my ELL friends and speech and language therapists! The color coded passage with all the parts of speech is such a bonus! Larger image.

Go to Rewordify.com!  Make your own FREE account. Begin differentiating immediately. You have time, the school year is just beginning!      Check back for my next post about Educator Central a part of the Rewordify page.

You are probably wondering who made this site and who supports it. I didn't have to look far to find out about Neil M. Goldman. Here is the scoop! Thanks, Mr. Goldman, this is a treasure. I am glad you found a way to help challenged learners.

Biography from Amazon

Neil M. Goldman spent fifteen years as a cubicle-bound computer professional and decided that he wanted to do more meaningful work than sit in front of a screen and write for-next loops.

So, he said a hearty goodbye to his marginally competent managers and a warm hello to the learning-hungry students in a suburban high school English classroom.

That first year of teaching was the hardest, most rewarding year of his life, and he felt he had to write about it. His first nonfiction book, Never Too Old To Teach, chronicled the joys and frustrations of that first year as a teacher.

Electric Dawn, his first novel, explores a scenario that's been on his mind for many years: what would happen if someone made a miraculous discovery of a device that would change the way the world works? Would that person be embraced and celebrated, or surrounded and destroyed?

When he's not writing books and grading papers, Neil enjoys motorcycling, cooking, and travel.

What is Mother’s Day in the 21st Century with an iGeneration, digital young man?

cross-posted at Techlearning.com
Before I tell you about my Mother’s Day, I thought I would look up  some information about Mother’s Day.


What do Japan, India, Pakistan, Germany, Canada, Brazil, Bangladesh, Australia and many other countries have in common with the United States of America? We all celebrate Mother’s Day on the second Sunday of the month of May. You can read in more detail here at Wikipedia. It is amazing that this is such an international day of celebration. It is something many of us can relate to and something we all have a part in whether we celebrate our own mothers or we celebrate with our children or we celebrate with any and all mothers around us.

Back to Mother’s Day May 9, 2010. Our son, Daniel,  a recent graduate from the University of Maine, Orono, decided to make dinner for me on Mother’s Day. Where did he get his recipe, where did he learn how to cook this dish he chose, how was he going to measure up? 
How did he do this? He watched the Giada de Laurentiis television cooking show, found the ingredients at the store, then used the Internet to find the recipe to prepare the meal. The laptop on the kitchen counter replaces the hundreds of cookbooks I have in my cupboards. He has access to millions more recipes and mentors for cooking than I had growing up.

I still remember the day I  learned how to make biscuits from my grandmother. I had to drive hundreds of miles to see her and then I watched her prepare biscuits, which to this day I still make from scratch. I remember teaching and cooking with all my sons. We prepared hundreds of snacks, breakfasts, lunches and dinners. Daniel knows his way around the kitchen. However, he has also benefited from the numerous televised cooking shows. When he wants to prepare a meal, he has millions of options, not just those on my cookbook shelf. Daniel can choose from many cooking mentors anytime of day, any culture, any meal. 

Join us for Spaghetti with smashed peas, sausage and ricotta cheese. Yum. 

Where does your library fit in the 21st Century Skills continuum?

This is a response to Darren Drapper's latest post at TechLearning. The post is a collection of quotes from some of our best thinkers and practioners in the field of library media science. Darren's question What is your vision for the ideal school library and what role do Media Specialists play? prompted my response:

"I see the ideal school library media center as the hub of our ideal media literate schools. I take the word media very literally and seriously. The hub should be the life of the school, the staff, the students and the larger community. The ideal school library media center should be the conduit to the world and other library centers. Where better to exemplify the collaborative nature of our lives than the library media center? As many of us know from experience, the virtual resources we have at our finger tips are exponential. We can use them all to our advantage, we can solve problems by interacting with digitized information. However, unless we have that ideal library media center at our disposal and an opportunity for some f2f, face to face, interaction, we will be living in a echo chamber and our solutions and ideas will not resonate with our world. My ideal library media center would have a window to the world where anyone, staff or students could video conference with an individual or group and get out of the echo chamber. What an opportunity! Can't wait to hear some other ideas. Thanks for the post Darren."

What is your ideal library media center all about?
I know our public librarian and I have had this conversation. I didn't have any answers at the time, but I know it is a conversation worth continuing. I am in the middle of proposing a 3 year Technology Plan for our district. I know the time my committee and I have spent working on this has been informative and will change how we go about the business of creating 21st Century Citizens. The consequences are immense, the conversation needs to happen, the disruptive push needs to move our school walls and our library media center walls.

MLTI Student Conference 2009

Please check out the results to our survey questions here http://docs.google.com/View?id=djtmqgv_57cm2k2bf4

A few months ago, I along with Kern Kelley, Alice Barr, and Sarah Sutter, were asked to be part of a presentation to 800 MLTI students at a student conference on the University of Maine campus. After several sessions on SKYPE and planning with conference organizer Jim Moulton, the 5 of us, were going to present to an auditorium of 800 participants in an interactive fashion. How can 800 participants interact with the presentation? With Google online tools! Wait a minute! I know we have a hard time when we get 20 students in a classroom using a wireless access point in one room, we freeze up, have slow speeds getting to a website, but with 800, oh my!
Jim assured us that the University would get their best thinkers and doers working on this. Dr. Bruce Seegee and the fine engineers from CISCO took on this mission and would actually join us in the session to watch the bandwidth use and troubleshoot if necessary. This would be a perfect opportunity for all the conference participants to observe what happens behind the scenes to make things work at their schools and for all to see that when using technology we always have a backup plan.
Our presentation was the final session at the end of a very busy and productive day. Our session was titled (http://archives.mainelearns.org/studentconference/)

Block 3 - Only Google is big enough - Everyone, all together, one room, one session!

o In 2009 Good Questions are More Powerful Than Good Answers - Google Super Session (Alice Barr - Yarmouth High School; Kern Kelley - MSAD #48; Cheryl Oakes - Wells Ogunquit CSD; Sarah Sutter - Wiscasset High School)Maine's own team of Google certified educators will be leading the whole gang through a series of activities that will demonstrate the power of the Google Toolset. Sure, we all use Google, but wait till you see what you can do when you understand how to leverage Google's power to go beyond getting answers and learn how to use Google to ask your own thoughtful questions of people in your class, in your school, around your state, or even around the world!

As part of the preparation, the five of us, created a series of questions in a Google Form, and sent the questions out to our worldwide networks, in 10 days we collected information from all our personal networks, and after some clamoring this information is published for all to share and use. Thank you to all who participated in our survey. We hope you will create a survey that we can participate in at some point in the future.

My favorite school project cross posted at techlearning.com

Staying in Character for Sarah Brynes
Permanent link

My favorite project is gearing up. How can it be my favorite, it is only the second time doing this with students? Well, the energy the project created and sustained, the comments from students, and the story all rolled into one, it is my favorite project. There is so much crammed into this project! There is something for everyone, including students, teachers, administrators, parents and students!

You can follow these guidelines and create your own social network project with any book you are using with your students. A NING, is a great social network to use with students ages 13 and older. NING is a very supportive site, and if the project is for an educational institution the NING folks will remove the ads from your ning site. All you need to do is email them, tell them your NING URL, say you are a school and ask for the ads to be removed.
The full directions are at posted here. Please try this out. We have been very happy for years with our free Ning service. The whole process took me 1 minute to fill out the form, and then wait 2 days for the ads to disappear. It couldn't be easier!

The eighth grade teachers, I am working with, chose a book for all 120 students to read. Part of the writing the students are asked to do is about writing in character. So, for this book, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, all the students read, choose a character they want to be, create a page in the Ning site and then blog, answer questions, create an avatar all in character. The name we chose for the Ning is, Staying in Character for Sarah Brynes. We hope by adding this piece of technology the students will feel free to write with purpose, share with purpose and think outside of themselves. By adding this work to a Ning, we create a social network where students can work while in class and continue conversations outside of the school day.

When our students join the ning they must fill in a profile with required questions. Sometimes this part takes a lot of thinking since we are asking them to respond in character immediately. This sets the stage as they answer questions about their zodiac sign, their moods, who they would like to meet, etc. Here is my profile:
About Me: Ms. Lemry Moods:empathic, supportive, futurist Who Would I like to meet?Eleanor Roosevelt Interests: gardens Zodiac Sign: Gemini Describe your life-changing moment and how it changed you. My life changing moment each year, is when I meet students who have grown another year older. I love hearing student ideas about school, technology, the future. I think it best when I attend 8th grade and 12th grade graduations and see what wonderful young people you have all become. Once the students get past the profile page, they head off and create an avatar of their character. We use this free avatar service. This is always fun for our students to compare their avatar with all the other Ms. Lemry's and avatars their peers have of the same characters in the book. After their avatar is posted they begin answering 3 prompts left by their teachers. The students/characters are also encouraged to comment to the other characters at they populate the Ning and as they answer the prompts.

When we started this project last school year in May, we had 4 weeks of school left, we will be in a similar position this year. I was sure that the students would start out in character, but soon would revert to themselves and comment about their dances, weekends, and their own 8th grade graduation. However, that did not come to pass. The students stayed in character for the entire project. The students had very thoughtful comments and blog responses.

This year I hope that the author, Chris Crutcher will check out the Ning and see how he has positively affected the students in our school. After all, by posting in our Ning we will have a wider audience. Check out Chris Crutcher's myspace. Our Ning will have opening day June 6, 2009. You can check out the main page from last year for an idea about what this looks like http://gr8litourspace.ning.com/ What is your latest book project?

cross posted at TechLearning.com

This is the perfect letter that we are all waiting for. So, we are sharing this with all of you who are intrepid technology users, early adopters, keep trying things, keep taking risks.

Dear Mr. P and Mrs. O,

I just wanted to let you both know how impressed I am re: the Ning Our Space site and the Our Tube site. Ted was very anxious to share his site with me.
The poetry video was a wonderful surprise, I watched many of the students and really was surprised @ the level of confidence some of the students showed.
I also think that this is a wonderfully safe way to introduce our children to Social Networking sites.

Thank you for allowing them this opportunity and for communicating this project so well through my child.

Have a great vacation week,


a parent



This was the best way to begin my spring vacation and will provide the motivation to keep using these new Web 2.0 tools with our students.



If you have followed my blog entries this entry is a follow-up to my Meet a 21st Century Learning, a Prosumer, a Student! post.



As teachers, we create projects, invest our time and our students' time in the projects which really are about the process of learning and demonstrating new skills. The project that our 8th grade language arts teachers and students have worked on all year, OurSpace, is about to come to an end. If you have followed my posts I apologize for this quick summary. We created a ning, kept it private-or a walled garden, as a place for our students to live in a social network where we demonstrate cyber-netiquette, appropriate chat, non-cyberbullying, copyright, creative commons with photos and music and finally uploading of a video poetry project. There is one more piece to this year long project, the piece that started the project, a pilot-an idea that blossomed to this full fledged project, one year ago this month. Next week, the teachers and students begin working in the Ning and take on a character in the book Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, by Chris Crutcher and actually live out the book through a series of descriptions, dialogues and predictions. It is a clever project enhanced by the social networking tools of the day.Since the projects are in a walled garden I captured a page from last year and published it here for you to view. (https://sites.google.com/site/wjhsartifact/)

Often times we rely on our students to 'promote' what we are experiencing in our classes. In theory that is a practice we would like to continue, however, in our busy times we need to be explicit about how that happens. In our case, a note when home to all parents explaining that the students' culminating poetry video project would be published on their web (ning) page. The projects are a glimpse into what is happening in our classes, a glimpse into what is happening in a teen's life, and a glimpse into how each individual student added to the quality and intensity of the grade level poetry project. When we make our classrooms transparent, we take a risk. This is what we must model for our students, the risk is part of the learning and the experience. A note from a parent is worth the risk. Listening to several students who personally thanked me at the end of multiple classes is worth the risk, the student who began her own ning site is worth the risk.



I must thank our school community for taking a risk using Web 2.0 21st Century Tools to enhance literacy. I must thank our principal who champions the use of technology and takes a risk every day promoting these different tools. Of course the teachers are very high on my list as they struggle, with me, through the newness of the landscape. The students did all the work, so a huge thank you to them for paving the way for newer projects to continue in years to come. These skills will keep them on the cutting edge of our ever changing work and career environments. Finally, our parents, I must thank them for attending the Internet Safety evenings, listening and trying out new challenges with their very savvy Internet students, keeping up with the new paths of this digital world. A huge thanks to a parent who found the time to write a note expressing what many parents are thinking and experiencing as they take this digital journey with their students. This makes it all worth the risk.