Alexander Pascual - ILA Newsletter Project: Effective Literacy Website #6

Rewordify (https://rewordify.com/) is an online tool that seems very much inconspicuous at first glance, but can prove to be the most valuable website for a literacy-focused classroom. In essence, Rewordify offers a simple text-based tool that allows its users to input text of any amount into its engine, whether it is a sentence, short paragraph, or even an entire published article, and it simplifies the text into more comprehensible words for beginning readers to read through. This tool effectively translates difficult words into simpler vocabulary, allowing students the accessibility to read and understand more than they normally could. For educators, the utility that Rewordify offers is tremendously invaluable as it allows for a greater level of ease of modification and/or accommodations for struggling readers and ELL students.

Using Rewordify is incredibly simple. After copy-pasting words into the Rewordify tool, a simplified version will be presented to the user. In this simplified text, certain words will be highlighted in yellow. These highlighted words can then be clicked on to show which words it derived from in the original text chunk. Moreover, Rewordify will also provide definitions for words that still need more context or clarification. And that’s it! There aren’t any other superfluous features on its website to distract users from the site’s overall purpose. This means that there are no advertisements, pop-ups, log-ins, or other nonessentials. Educators can feel a general sense of relief in knowing that their students can safely use this tool without much unnecessary hassle.

Finally, for students who may opt to learn more and extend their vocabulary, the Rewordify website now also offers a feature known as Learning Sessions. Not only can users simplify words for understanding, but they can now generate more challenging words to improve their word retention. In the same fashion as simplifying a text, users can instead click on purple highlights (instead of yellow) to raise the difficulty of a text they’ve inputted. Through this feature, individualized lessons are formed for each student. Data from these learning sessions can also be provided to the educator through colored charts and graphs.