Three online tools for Reading

While proper precautions need to be taken to avoid strain while "screen reading," online tools to help build reading and understanding can make it worthwhile. Here are three tools to consider with your students.

Vocabulary Building with Lingro

Lingro (http://lingro.com) is an excellent tool for vocabulary development, and it has been well received by ESL students at Unionville. When looking at any web page through Lingro, every word on the page becomes clickable to speak, define, or translate the word. For beginning English Language Learners and Modern Languages students, Lingro supports translation between most combinations of 11 major languages including English, Chineese, French, and Spanish. More advanced students can use definitions in the language they are learning for help understanding the word.
A powerful feature of Lingro is its ability to create personalized word lists as students read. Every word that is clicked is automatically added to that student's "Word History," and students can drag and drop these words into word lists. To reinforce these words, Lingro can show students the sentence in which they encountered the word, and can randomize them into a flash cards game as a study tool. When students register for a free account with Lingro they can save their word history and access it from a different computer.
While Lingro works best while reading public web pages, it also has a file upload feature to allow Lingro tools to be used with text, Word (in .doc format), and PDF documents.

Active Reading with Diigo

Highlighting and note taking are good active reading skills. Diigo (http://www.diigo.com) is a great tool for highlighting web pages in any of four colours and adding floating "sticky notes" to summarize ideas. Diigo annotations are saved automatically, and can be shared with others like peers or with a teacher. The site also has good teacher tools to manage a class of free student accounts. Diigo works with password protected sites, so students can annotate a text posted on a Moodle page. For more information on Diigo, see the January 13, January 20 and February 10 Digital Dispatches on the Unionville Digital Literacy moodle.

"Drawing" Connections with MarkUp

MarkUP (http://markup.io/) is a tool that turns any web page into a whiteboard that you can draw or type on. This could be used in text to trace implied references in pronouns or between ideas. Drawing on a diagram or image could highlight important details or build connections between different parts of the work. MarkUp does not use accounts to save annotations, and instead gives a unique URL link to a page with the annotations and a snapshot image of the web page at the time it was annotated. MarkUp will work on password protected pages, but has limited security so should not be used on sensitive information.