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Fluency Tutor is an application for Google Chrome which allows educators to assign reading passages to students via their Google Drive accounts. 
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How does reading proficiency impact a child's life? Check out this infographic to find out. Research is showing that the a child's reading level in 3rd grade is an indicator of future success.
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An elementary school teacher shares how she downloads "books that are currently free at Amazon" and loads them on iPads for her students to read. She provides the details to know how she makes it work. The website she uses to find the free books is One Hundred Free Books. The link is http://onehundredfreebooks.com/. This site publishes names of free books across many genres including Free Fiction, Non-Fiction, Romance, Mystery, Thrillers, Young Adult, and Cooking Books.
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An English and Media Studies teachers looks at iPads and how they may prove to be a "pivotal tool for effective and engaging group teaching and learning, it has the potential to promote literacy and reading in an innovative and exciting fashion." The post provides 10 practical teaching and learning strategies to enhance reading using the iPad.
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High school students today are reading books intended for children with reading levels far below those appropriate for teens, according to a recent report. Renaissance Learning, Inc. has released "What Kids Are Reading: The Book-Reading Habits of Students in American Schools." The data in the report comes from "the Accelerated Reader Real Time database (which) includes book-reading records for more than 7.6 million studentsfrom 24,265 schools nationwide who read more than 241 million books during the 2010–2011 school year. Based on the ATOS readability formula (which looks at vocabulary and sentence complexity) the reading level of many books used in high school are often at 4th to 5th grade level. This article lists the top 20 books read among US high schoolers in 2010 -2011 and additional information. The complete report is available as a pdf file at
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Different students have different ways of learning, and this is absolutely true for literacy. Jules Daulby, whose wheelhouse includes SEN and English teaching, discusses how a certain amount of pupils are best learning with their ears...
Beth Dichter's insight:
This post begins: "In order to be an effective reader, two skills are required:
The post also provides access to an interview with Dr. Keith Stanovich who "argues that reading improves ‘crystallized intelligence’ and compares children who do not learn to read with those who do, by using ‘the Matthew Effect’ analogy." The question remains, how do we help students whom do not read well, who have difficulty decoding text? We need to seriously consider the options, which include aural text (as in text that is read to students). This issue is close to my heart. We want our students to be successful, yet we do not provide tools that are readily available to all who would benefit from them. This post looks at resources that are available in England for struggling readers. I will add a number of resources that are available in the US, and others may add resources for their countries in the comment section. The question that each of us must answer is should we advocate for our students who are struggling with their reading skills to be able to use TTS (text-to-speech) programs that provide them with the ability to listen to the text and understand the text, without necessarily relying on their decoding skills? Do we give them the opportunity to level the playing field? By providing students with access to text that meets their learning style, we have given them the opportunity to be successful. Today there are many free (or low cost) tools available that allow students to have text read to them. In the US two key players that help provide text to students (think books) with diagnosed reading disabilities are Bookshare, which provides free access to many books as well as TTS software and Learning Ally, which has many resources for students with dyslexia but may also require a membership fee. Additional sites to check out are Natural Voice Reader, which will read digitized text directly from a website and Rewordify, which will simplify the text. Do you know free (or low cost) tools that help struggling readers? Please share them in the comment section.
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Is traditional reading and writing enough to be considered literate in the 21st century? Check out this slideshow from Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano which asks us to "rethink our notion of critical literacy." She also suggests that we "develop authentic learning and assessment opportunities {as we} upgrade and amplify our curriculum."
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The hard truth is people have to be able to read and write, or they’re going to be at a severe disadvantage in life. Did you know that "93 million American adults have limited reading and quantitative skills," that "literacy is tied to better health, employment and correlates to children's literacy." This infographic provides a picture on illiteracy in the America.
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It's National Share a Story month! Read, share and enjoy lots of wonderful stories with these great resources. A wide range of stories, ranging from videos, to signed stories, audio stories and many more!
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If you have Chrome installed on computers at your school consider checking out this app called Fluency Tutor. The website states FluencyTutor "is an easy-to-use, time-saving leveled reading and assessment tool that helps busy teachers support struggling readers. Teachers pick reading passages based on content, lexile level or reading age and share with individual students or groups via Google Drive."
Students may access material from home or school and can record passages. Text-to-speech, a dictionary, a picture dictionary and translation tools are also available.
The teacher dashboard and the student area for interaction is free. If you want to be able to see analytics, track progress, and more there is a charge of $99 per year (for teachers).
Tools such as this are great free resources for many students. You might also want to check out Read&Write for Google.