Due to our 2024-2025 AT partnership with Georgia Tech's Tools for Life, Georgia Department of Education, and TextHelp, and the licenses purchased by the county, the premium toolsets are available to ALL students in Meriwether County!! All grades, all schools!!
Read&Write is a Google Chrome extension that houses reading and writing tools on its toolbar. Let's take a look at an overview of the tools available in Read&Write. Then we will look closely at each individual tool and its uses.
Read&Write Tools available to ALL Students
Read&Write contains, first and foremost, several text readers that can be used to read digital text thereby giving our students access to the curriculum or enhanced access to the curriculum.
A translator is provided on the toolbar that gives our students access to many different languages. For a quick glance at the languages supported, visit https://support.texthelp.com/help/list-of-languages-used-in-translation
Would you like to record your voice while reading? Well look no further! As that is exactly what the Practice Reading Aloud tool does:) You can practice reading while recording your voice, listen back to your recording, and then share with your teachers or speech language pathologists.
This is yet another way to use a text reader on websites, Google Docs, and Google Slides. It is specifically composed to make inaccessible text, accessible. The student can click and drag a box around the text they want to read and the OCR feature goes to work to make that text accessible.
Have you ever used a colored overlay to assist in reading? What if you could put a bar on the computer screen to assist in staying on the line as you read? Screen Masking combines these concepts into a fabulous digital tool to allow for better access to material. This tool uses a colored bar to provide a way for the student to have a digital reading guide on the computer screen. It is completely customizable to the student's likes and dislikes.
Have you ever wished there was something you could do to remove clutter from a webpage to better assist in your reading or to help you stay focused? Simplify is a tool that does just that...it simplifies a webpage by removing clutter that is often associated with websites (flashing ads, links, etc). There are several features inside of this tool to allow the student to adjust the font size, contrast color, and line spacing.
Years ago, if you wanted to know what a word meant, you would have to pull out a dictionary and look the word up. In today's age, there are many different technologies that makes defining and understanding words much quicker. TextHelp has built into it's Read&Write toolbar a dictionary and a picture dictionary. And the greatest feature, there is a text reader available to read the definition!
Collect Highlights is a way for a student to use the highlighters available to identify important information and then take that information and place it in a separate Google Doc. There are four highlighter colors available on the toolbar.
Ever wanted to take vocabulary words and make a table that contains the word, a picture, a definition, and a space for taking notes? Boy would that make studying so much more streamlined and efficient! Guess what? The Vocabulary List tool does just that! And it even puts that table on a separate Google Doc! It's fully editable as well:)
Are you lacking time in the day to get all your reading done? Audio Maker can convert text into an audio file so that you can listen to a webpage, a Google Doc, or a Google Slide presentation at your leisure. Drop the mp3 file into Google Drive for an added convenience:)
When working in Google Docs, you can add a voice recording to comment, ask a question, or share information with your teacher. This is a fabulous way to interact with your teachers but you have to talk fast...it only records up to one minute at a time:)
When you send a text to a friend, do you use the word prediction feature on your phone? Welcome to word prediction inside a Google Doc and Google Slides. This is a writing feature that gives the student a bank of words to choose from as they write. It also has a text reader that will read those choices to assist the student in determining their words.
Ever dictated a text message or asked Siri, Alexa, or Google Home to assist you? What if you had that speech to text ability for writing a paper? Talk&Type is a way to use Google's very own Voice Typing tool inside of a Google Doc to quickly get your thoughts and knowledge on a digital "sheet of paper".
After using your tools such as Word Prediction and Talk&Type to write your paper, let's now use Check It to do just that! Check It is a grammar and spell checker built into one so that our students can turn in a paper that has been thoroughly checked for errors.
New to the Read&Write toolbar, introducing Rewordify! Rewordify is a tool that simplifies complex texts by rewriting them in clearer, more accessible language. It helps users, such as students and non-native English speakers, by breaking down difficult passages and providing simpler alternatives and definitions for tough words. By making challenging content easier to understand, Rewordify aids in improving reading comprehension and learning.
OrbitNote gives our students access to a worksheet that has been shared as a PDF. The tools on the toolbar are very similar to those on the Read&Write toolbar with a couple of new tools. The new tools give students a way to access the information on a PDF and also "write" on the worksheet.