Technology and Learning Colleagues,
A Conversation has been taking place this month in the Disabilities CoP about software tools and resources to help learners read text from the Internet without distractions such as side margin and pop-up ads, and top banners. I am excited to see a dialogue in which one colleague, Ed Latham, raises an important learning challenge and offers a software solution; I am equally excited to see another colleague, Robert Wessel, try it out and report on that solution. I like that Ed invites others to provide their views on the solution he has proposed, and to offer other software solutions, that Robert offers another software solution, and that Ed continues to offer other software solutions. I like that Daphne Greenberg chimes in with a possible solution. I like that Robert reports back that he has been using the original solution Ed proposed and finds it “very useful”.
I hope more LINCS community members who face the teaching and learning challenge that Ed has raised, and who are interested in exploring and discussing technology solutions, will join in this conversation. This thread is not only useful to those who are interested in how to successfully integrate the use of technology in learning, but is a great example of how LINCS CoPs can bring colleagues together to help each other meet challenges and improve practice, a very important service that the LINCS communities provide. Many thanks to Ed, Robert and Daphne for taking advantage of it, and I hope more will join in this discussion thread.
Note: The bolding of the quoted text below is mine.
On December 18, 2015 Edward Latham wrote:
…We all are aware that there are many articles and documents on the Internet we wish learners to engage in. One challenge I face at times with some learners is that pages that house some of this rich content have so many distractions. Side margins are full of flashy, distracting ads, top banners flowing like a ticker tape and there are even some pop up ads that show up from time to time on some sites.
I have found one tool that I think is really cool, but I am finding a few limitations. The tool is called Readability (Link here). Here is a link to a video that gives you a quick over view of the tool. You do need to sign up (free account) to store your articles. Once you are signed in, you can offer readability a link to an article and Readability will strip out all the distractions, the images, everything from that page to capture just the text of the article. It even has options of changing the font, size of font, offers a black on white or white on black scheme, and how wide a page of text is. This is all great if I go to print things out, but I am encountering huge issues with sharing that stripped resource with students digitally on their devices. My best solution so far has been copy and paste to a google doc that can be shared. This has the limitation of loosing all the text manipulation options that are so easy in the readability resource.
Has anyone found resources out there that help strip the Internet clutter out of good articles and readings online? Perhaps someone with some time or experience to play with Readability might help me find some way to better share stripped content with learners in a way the learners can easily manipulate the text, color, size, .... features to accommodate individual needs. Please share suggestions, or options. If you want to share your feelings on Readability that would be great to hear your perspective a well. Looking forward to hearing how others are finding ways to reduce the clutter for students on the Internet.
On December 18, Robert Wessel replied:
I installed the Readability extension on Google Chrome and did a few tests. I like how it gives you just the content in a clean format.
I copied and pasted the content into Microsoft Word, WordPad, TextMaker, Libre Office and OpenOffice Writer, and Google Docs. It copied perfectly into Word and almost as well into both versions of Writer. The other options changed the formatting to varying, unacceptable degrees.
With Word and Writer, I saved the document in both .docx and .rtf formats. When I opened these files in the other word processors, they looked exactly as they did in Word and Writer. They also looked the same in Google Docs, after I uploaded them. So, if you convert the content with Word or Writer, learners will be able to view and edit it with the full capabilities of whatever word processor they happen to have on their device.
I was also able use Word and Writer to save the copied-and-pasted content in PDF format, so learners could also view it with Adobe or another PDF viewer.
If you left-click inside the Readability text, a row of icons will appear on the left-hand side of the screen. There are several options for sharing the content. Sending it to a Kindle is a little complicated, but because Kindle has integrated dictionaries, it might be a useful option for some learners. I downloaded a document in ePub format and used Calibre to read it. Again, learners could use any of the capabilities of whatever eBook reader they have on their device to read it.
I hope this helps.
On December 19, Ed replied to Robert:
Thank you for testing out all those options and sharing with us what you found! As you mentioned, there is that export to kindle, and other services like twitter, facebook and even email. This got me thinking that Kindle provides a free cloud for everyone and is accessible from every device. Perhaps it is possible to have a document set up on one station and have each student come over and upload that document to their cloud? I would have to check to see if it allows you to indicate which kindle account the document goes to. If it locks in on one account that option is not as useful.
This got me thinking, wouldn't we benefit from just introducing the learners directly to the readability service? In that way they gain the individuality of being able to do the text conversion of anything they find and want to focus on. I wonder what types of challenges this [might] have within the disabled community? Would [we] be able to create guides or supports that would help with challenges to accessing and using readability on their own devices? I would love to hear perspectives on this for those that have the time to check out the readability plug in. It seems to me that once the plug in is installed, the learners simply need to click the button to be able to view a page in a way more aligned to their needs? What do others think about this?
On December 19, Robert replied:
I came across a similar product to Readability called Pocket (getpocket.com) that allows you to save content to your device for offline reading at a later time. It also strips out the clutter and you can copy and paste the text into Google Docs and TextMaker without losing any of the formatting. As with Readability, there are Android and Kindle apps, and an extension for the Chrome browser. It doesn't, however, allow you to download the content to different formats as Readability does.
As long as learners have basic computer skills and are comfortable using their devices, I don't see why they can't be shown how to use Readability or Pocket on their own, and how to reformat it to suit their needs. This is really no different than things they are already doing.
On December 19, Ed replied:
Amazon does have an option called Family Library (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201620400) that allows people with different Amazon accounts to share files across their clouds. The downside is that they also have to share their credit card data.
Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) enables you to easily convert word processor documents (.docx, .rtf) to .mobi, the format used by both the hardware and software versions of the Kindle Reader. Once the document is converted, it should just be a matter of transferring the file to the Kindle device via a USB cable. Sharing it via something like Dropbox should also work.
Amazon has a Send to Kindle app that lets you send files from a PC to your cloud or to a specific Kindle device, but I'm not able to test toggling between different Amazon accounts in the PC app to see whether it's feasible or not.
On December 21, Daphne Greenberg added:
I thought that this might be a good time to remind folks that a collection of web-based texts for adult learners (those who read at 3rd grade level and higher) can be found at:
http://csal.gsu.edu/content/library-resources
In addition, people may be interested in learning about how the web-based texts in the repository were scaled to decide whether they are "easier" "medium" or "harder". The readability tool called: Coh-metrix was used, and can be found here:
http://csal.gsu.edu/content/readability
Daphne Greenberg
Center for the Study of Adult Literacy,
Georgia State University
On December 30, Robert added:
I've been using Readability regularly after learning about it here. Because it integrates with Google Chrome, I am able to save the de-cluttered version of articles displayed in Readability as PDF documents I can later view, highlight, and annotate in Adobe Reader. (Saving as PDF is a feature of Chrome's print option.) This is very useful.
On December 30, Ed Latham replied:
Thank you for sharing how readability is working for you and your students! Always nice to hear how people use different tools in different ways. I had not tried the PDF option you shared, but I can see how that would be very powerful in situations where a teacher may not have internet access with learners. I am thinking of situations like in Prisons where some printed copies of Internet text could be used to advantage.
I wanted to share with everyone another resource that I am finding useful with my struggling readers. Many of you may have already used this tool and if you have, it would be great to hear your experiences. The tool is called newsela and it provides us with recent news articles translated into many different reading levels. They actually have a team of writers that rewrite the news multiple times with each revision increasing in complexity of the vocabulary and sentence structure. Better still, they create comprehension quizzes for each version and these quizzes are also scaled in complexity based on ability. In this way, I have seen struggling readers find a level they could understand and find some success with and they are reading adult, recent information that is relevant to their lives. This is a stark contrast to many of the beginning reading texts that are often designed for young children.
Learners start exploring what the "next level up" looks like and many are easily able to see what challenges they face. It is cool to watch a learner read with understanding, then jump to a higher level and watch them struggle in a positive way. They start identifying key words and phrases they want to know more about to better understand. They want to know why it was ok to switch the noun and verb around in this sentence but not in the version originally read. In short, since the content is familiar to them they start to learn how to reflect on their comprehension challenges and learn to articulate those challenges to others. Super powerful stuff here!
Of course they then dive into the quiz questions to see if they can tackle those "harder" questions. I have found they are having much less success with the questions. In discussions with students as to why there is more difficulty, it appears that learners are able to identify and address challenges in reading with the many versions of the readings available, but they are not as easily able to change the levels of thinking that change in the questions. These explorations and observations have led to some wonderful discussions as to how people think, process, and expand thinking options. Tie these discussions into Webb's Depth of Knowledge Wheel and the smiles and confidence in learners increase.
It is so important that we realize that not only are there tons of great, free tools out there, the way we use them with learners is often so much more important! I have used Newsela before with very little in terms of results. I analyzed why those attempts did not work, I talked to others using the tool to get ideas, I talked with learners to get feedback and tried a bunch of different strategies. Then as I started to link the natural discussion flows into the Webb's tool and what that shared with the readers, I was surprised at how powerful those connections were. Teaching is all about exploration to learn different ways to learn. As the "holders of information", I worry that many of us loose that sense of exploration and discovery. Maybe our field of exploration is no longer our content areas we may be "experts" in? I am always discovering new ways to combine things I already thought I knew well and tools I have already used and discarded some time ago as useless. I think many of us can point to things that DON'T work, forums like this one allow us to share those attempts and to share our successful combinations with others so we can all learn from each other.
If you have used Readability, or NewsELA or Webb's Wheel, or any other tool you have discovered please share how it went, what you tried and your thoughts. Maybe you had a horrible experience that others could learn from? Maybe you had a wonderful experience? Even if it was just a "normal" experience, sharing how the tool was used can be educational to us all because we have no book or resource we can all go to to look this stuff up. None of the tutorials for these tools or their websites share the information we can all share with each other simply by sharing our attempts and observations. I look forward to hearing more about the explorations in the field and I thank you all in advance for sharing your experiences and any thoughts you have on the experiences already shared in this thread.
David J, Rosen, Moderator
Technology and Learniung CoP
djrosen123@gmail.com