1,001 Novels Mapped
I’m taking the week off to do a bunch of fun things with my kids. While I’m away the most popular posts of the year so far will reappear. 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is an ESRI story map developed by Susan Straight. The story map features short reviews of 1,000 American novels. Each […]
Readlee Adds Support for More Languages
As I wrote last week, Readlee was one of my favorite new tools of the last school year. It’s a tool that you can use to gain great insight into how your students read. Readlee does that through the use of AI that provides you and your students with feedback about things like how many […]
New Readlee Features for the New School Year
Readlee was one of my favorite new tools in the last school year. The basic concept of Readlee is your students complete assignments by reading to their computers then Readlee uses artificial intelligence to provide you and your students will feedback on their reading. For the new school year Readlee has added some new features. […]
Best of 2022 So Far – Readlee
I’m taking the rest of the week off. While I’m gone I’ll be republishing some of the most popular posts of the year so far. Every once in a while a new edtech service comes along that as soon as I try it I know that it’s going to be a hit. That’s exactly how […]
Summer Reading, Notebooks, and Thinking
If you’ve joined one of my webinars about search strategies or taken my Teaching History With Technology course, you probably know that I advocate for two very non-techy activities. Those things are reading physical books and writing in a physical notebook. I have always found that when I read physical books, regardless of whether they’re […]
Eclecticism – Some Good Weekend Reading
It’s the weekend, it’s spring (in the northern hemisphere), and that means some of you will be looking through job listings in hopes of finding a new position for the next school year. Others of you may just be looking for something fun to read this weekend. In either case, head over to Terry Freedman’s […]
Readlee – Know How Your Students Read Online Assignments
Every once in a while a new edtech service comes along that as soon as I try it I know that it’s going to be a hit. That’s exactly how I felt when I tried Readlee for the first time last month. Readlee is a new service that lets you create online reading assignments for […]
Actionable Insights for Reading Progress in Microsoft Teams
Last week Microsoft added some new aspects to the Reading Progress tools in Microsoft Teams. One of those new features is called Actionable Insights. As the name implies, it provides you with information about your students’ reading progress and lets you create assignments based on those insights. The means that after you have reviewed the […]
Reading Progress + ReadWorks in Microsoft Teams = Awesome!
This fall I’ve been seeing a lot of people Tweet about how much they like the new Reading Progress feature in Microsoft Teams. Not being a regular Teams user myself, I didn’t give it a good look until this week. I wish I had looked at it sooner! Reading Progress in Microsoft Teams gives you […]
Great Reads from Great Places – An Interactive Map from the Library of Congress
Great Reads from Great Places is an interactive map produced by the Library of Congress for the National Book Festival. The purpose of the map is twofold. First, to help visitors find National Book Festival-related events in their states. Second, to help visitors find books that are connected to their states. Those connections could be […]
Free Summer Reading Packets from ReadWorks
Summer is here in the northern hemisphere. If you find yourself looking for some summer reading that you can give to elementary and middle school students, ReadWorks has you covered. Once again this summer ReadWorks is offering free summer reading packets that you can send home with your students. The free summer reading packets are available with […]
ReadWorks Adds an Offline Mode for Students
ReadWorks is a non-profit service that I’ve been recommending for years. It is a free service that provides high-quality fiction and non-fiction articles and lesson plans for K-12 ELA teachers. Every article on ReadWorks is accompanied by a Lexile score and a suggested grade level. Any article that you select will also be accompanied by […]
Actively Learn – Find & Create Engaging Reading Assignments and More
Disclosure: This is a sponsored post that I wrote for a new supporter of FreeTech4Teachers.com. A few years ago I stumbled upon Actively Learn while walking through the ISTE conference. I was immediately impressed by what they were developing. At that time it was just getting started as a new platform through which teachers can […]
Find Halloween ELA Articles on ReadWorks
Last week I shared a Halloween-themed physical education lesson and instructions on how to find and modify Kahoot games about Halloween. Those of you who are looking for Halloween-themed stories to use in ELA lessons could do well to turn to this collection on ReadWorks. The bulk of the Halloween collection on ReadWorks features articles […]
Wonderopolis Now Includes Immersive Reader
Wonderopolis is a great site for finding interesting articles to spark your students’ imaginations. I’ve been a fan of the site since I first discovered it more than six years ago. At its core Wonderopolis offers more than 2400 interesting articles for elementary school and middle school students. Each article covers a different topic that […]
Rivet – A Reading App from Google
Rivet is a reading app from Area 120 (a Google property). The free app offers more than 2,000 books for students to read independently. The books are appropriate for students in Kindergarten through second grade (5-8 years old). All of the books provide audio support to students in the form of an option to tap […]
120 Free Winter-themed Reading Lesson Plans
ReadWorks is an excellent service that provides teachers with free reading lesson plans. ReadWorks offers lesson plans that can be used in classrooms from Kindergarten through 12th grade. All of the lessons are standards-aligned. And if you don’t want to use ReadWorks’ lesson plans, you can simply use any of their thousands of fiction and […]
Free PD Webinar – Article a Day With ReadWorks
ReadWorks is a free service that I have been writing about for the last few years. It offers free reading lesson plans aligned to standards for all K-12 students. Tomorrow, at 4pm Eastern Time ReadWorks is offering a free webinar on how to use their Article a Day feature in your classroom. The webinar will […]
ReadWorks Now Integrates With Google Classroom
ReadWorks is a free service that provides standards-aligned reading lesson plans for K-12 classrooms. In addition to lesson plans ReadWorks offers a huge libray of fiction and non-fiction literature that you can search according to topic and grade level. All articles in ReadWorks are listed with a lexile score and suggested grade level. ReadWorks has […]
Virtual Reality Book Tours
In 5 Multimedia Projects for Social Studies Classes I included the idea of having students make their own virtual tours of historic and interesting landmarks. The concepts used to make a virtual tour of historic landmarks can be used to create virtual tours based on the books that students read. This is easier to do […]
Poetry 180 – A Poem for Every Day of the School Year
Poetry 180 is a Library of Congress project that was created when Billy Collins was the U.S. Poet Laureate. The purpose of the project is to provide high school teachers with poems for their students to read or hear throughout the school year. Collins selected the poems for Poetry 180 with high school students in […]
Your Next Read – Webs of Book Recommendations
Your Next Read is a site that provides you with a web of book recommendations based on the authors and books you already like. Here’s how it works; type in the title of a book you like or author you like and Your Next Read will provide you with a web of books that might also enjoy. Click […]
Novels on Location – A Map of Novels
Novels on Location is a neat of use Google Maps. The idea behind Novels on Location is to help readers find novels according to the story’s geographical settings. When you visit Novels on Location you can find novels by clicking on the placemarks that you see on the Google Map. An alternative way to search is by using […]
The Ten Individual Author Blogs That I Read First
Earlier this week someone taking my From Blog to Job on-demand course asked me if I still use Feedly to subscribe to blogs and which blogs I read first. Yes, I still use Feedly to subscribe to blogs because I find it to be the easiest way to scroll through the latest entries from my […]
Rewordify – A Tool to Help Students Understand Complex Texts
Rewordify is a free site that can help students understand complex passages of text. At its most basic level Rewordify takes a complex passage and rephrases it in simpler terms. Students can adjust Rewordify’s settings to match their needs. For example, students can add words to a “skip list” and those words will not be changed […]
Read2Me – Free Text to Audio Conversion
Read2Me is a free service that will convert a webpage or an uploaded document into an audio file that you can listen to on the Read2Me website. To use Read2Me you simply have to paste a link to an article or upload a file and then be patient while it converts to audio. When the […]
Front Row Offers Differentiated Resources for Social Studies Instruction
Front Row has developed a great reputation over the last couple of years for the differentiated math and ELA resources that it offers to teachers and students. This week at ISTE 17 I sat down with the CEO of Front Row to take a look at the new social studies resources that Front Row is […]
Owl Eyes – Guide Students Through Classic Literature
Owl Eyes is a free tool that provides teachers with a good way to provide students with guidance while they are reading classic literature. Owl Eyes provides teachers with tools to insert annotations and questions into classic literature. Students can see the annotations and questions that their teachers add to the digital text. Teachers have the […]
Fact Fragment Frenzy
Fact Fragment Frenzy is a free iPad and Android app from Read Write Think. The purpose of the app is to help students learn how to pull facts out of a passage of text. The app includes a demonstration video in which the narrator explains which words in a text represent facts and which words […]
CommonLit Introduces a New Book Pairing Feature
CommonLit is a free service that helps teachers by providing thematic questions for a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction articles. The discussion questions on CommonLit aren’t your typical “how does the author use foreshadowing?” kind of questions. Rather the discussion questions deal with larger themes like “how do we define the roles of men […]
5 Good Resources for National Poetry Month
April is Poetry Month. Whether you’re trying to help students understand and interpret the meaning of poems or you’re trying to help them write their own poems, the following five resources are worth exploring. (By the way, I always wonder who gets to declare the something is “national X month?” That might be a good, […]
Teach Your Monster to Read Minigames Overview
Last month the folks behind the popular Teach Your Monster to Read virtual world for literacy development introduced a set of minigames. The minigames are short activities designed to help students improve the speed and accuracy with which they recognize letters. In the video embedded below I provide a short overview of the Teach Your […]
Free Through the Weekend – Teach Your Monster to Read Mobile Apps
Teach Your Monster to Read is one of my favorite online programs for helping children learn to recognize letters and sounds. The browser-based version of Teach Your Monster to Read is free and always has been free. The mobile apps for the program are usually not free. Through this coming Sunday (March 26th) the iPad […]
Listen and Read – Nonfiction Read-along Activities
Listen and Read is a set of 15 nonfiction read-along stories. The stories feature pictures and short passages of text that students can read on their own or have read to them by each story’s narrator. The collection of stories is divided into three categories: Community Club which would be better described as “careers,” animals, and […]
Teach Your Monster to Read Minigames
Teach Your Monster to Read is a fun online environment in which students play games that are designed to help them improve the speed and accuracy with which they recognize letters, sounds, and words. Students play the games as friendly monster avatars that they are helping learn to read. This week, Teach Your Monster to […]
Articles and Lessons About Weather – From ReadWorks
ReadWorks is a great service that provides lesson plans designed around nonfiction and fiction articles. All of the articles provided by ReadWorks are labeled with a suggested grade level and a Lexile score. The ReadWorks Digital classroom service provides teachers with a free way to distribute assignments and monitor students’ progress. Learn more about ReadWorks […]
CommonLit Added a Guided Reading Mode for Students
CommonLit is a free service that offers a large collection of fiction and nonfiction texts paired to reading questions. You can create a classroom on CommonLit in which you can monitor your students’ progress through the texts that you assign to them. Recently, CommonLit added a new feature that they call Guided Reading Mode. When […]
Reading Rockets Provides Students With Daily Reading Tips
Reading Rockets Reading Tip of the Day widget does exactly what its name implies, it provides daily reading tips. The widget can be installed in your blog or website. This widget requires the use of javascript! Applications for Education The Reading Tip of the Day widget could be a good addition to your school blog or website. The […]
Two Ways to Create Book Trailers on Chromebooks – Video Demonstration
A book trailer is a short video designed to entice someone else to read a book that you enjoyed. Having your students create book trailer videos is a nice alternative to the typical book report assignment. I’ve previously shared an outline of the elements needed to create a book trailer video. Earlier this week someone […]
Literature Map Helps You Find Authors You’ll Like
Finding books that kids will like can be a difficult task. Literature Map is a tool that might make that process easier. Literature Map provides a web of authors you might like based on authors that you already enjoy reading. To use Literature Map just type an author’s name into the search box and webbed list of authors will be displayed. […]
PrepFactory Introduces Great, New Practice Activities for Middle School Students
PrepFactory is a popular service that for years has offered great, self-paced SAT and ACT preparation activities. For the new school year PrepFactory has expanded to offer self-paced math and language arts lessons for middle school students. The self-paced lessons and activities in the new middle school section in PrepFactory reflect the recent changes to […]
Youngzine is Updated for 2016-17 School Year – Great Current Events Resource
Youngzine is a great service that provides teachers with current events articles written for classroom use. I first used the site in 2012 and it has only gotten better since then. Youngzine has been updated for the 2016-17 school year with a fresh and responsive design, new classroom discussion features, and easier sign-in options. Youngzine […]
6000+ Children’s Books Available for Free
The University of Florida’s Digital Collections offers a huge library of digitized children’s books. Thanks to Open Culture I discovered this collection this afternoon and immediately started to browse through it. The books that you will find in the collection consist of works that are in the public domain. You can search for books according […]
Owl Eyes Offers a Good Way to Guide Students Through Classic Literature
Owl Eyes is a relatively new tool that provides teachers with a good way to provide students with guidance while they are reading classic literature. Owl Eyes provides teachers with tools to insert annotations and questions into classic literature. Students can see the annotations and questions that their teachers add to the digital text. Teachers […]
Teach Your Monster to Read
Another question that appeared on the Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page over the weekend read, Hello Richard, I love your blog and thanks for sharing . Do you know a good free site for preschoolers to practise phonics? My suggestion for that reader was to take a look at Teach Your Monster to Read. Teach […]
ABCD Wordie Analyzes Text and Creates Vocabulary Lists
ABCD Wordie is a handy tool for evaluating the level of the vocabulary in a passage of text. To use ABCD Wordie you simply paste a chunk of text into the ABCD Wordie site and then choose one of nine levels that describe the reading skills of your students. Once that selection is made ABCD […]
The Classroom Bookshelf – A Blog of Literature Lesson Ideas
This afternoon at ISTE 2016 I met with Kathy Ishizuka who is the editor of School Library Journal. Kathy shared with me her excitement about School Library Journal welcoming The Classroom Bookshelf as a new member of their blog network. The Classroom Bookshelf is a blog that many teachers have enjoyed in the past. The […]
How to Create a Book Trailer Video
Creating a book trailer video can be a great alternative to writing a book report. To create a good book trailer video students will have to make a list of highlights of a book and arrange them into proper sequence. Students should also include commentary on why they liked a book and why someone else […]
Teach Your Monster to Read – Now on Android and iPad
Teach Your Monster to Read is a great series of online games designed to help students improve the speed and accuracy with which they recognize letters and sounds. The website gets its name from the friendly monster avatars that students help learn to read through the course of the games. The Teach Your Monster to […]
How to Use ReadWorks Digital – Create, Share, & Grade Reading Assignments
A few weeks ago ReadWorks teased the launch of a new platform called ReadWorks Digital. Yesterday, ReadWorks Digital finally launched to general public. ReadWorks Digital is built upon the popular ReadWorks service for finding articles aligned to grade level, lexile, and Common Core standards. ReadWorks articles are accompanied by reading comprehension questions, vocabulary lists, and […]
Thousands of Free eBooks for Summer Reading
A couple of weeks ago I featured the summer reading packs offered by ReadWorks. Those reading packs are a great option for those teachers and students looking for relatively short articles. For those teachers and students in need of longer ebooks, I recommend taking a look at what Zing has to offer. Zing is a […]
Stackup – Create & Track Reading Goals in Chrome
Stackup is a free service that aims to help you give students credit for time spent reading quality articles online. On Stackup you can create reading challenges for your students. A challenge could be something like “read current events for 60 minutes this week.” After creating the challenge you invite students to join it. Students […]
Access LitCharts on Your iPhone or Android Phone
Last week I published a blog post about LitCharts. Shortly after that post went live my friend Denise texted me to say how much she loves the LitCharts iPhone app. Until then I wasn’t aware that LitCharts offered an iOS app. It turns out that LitCharts is also available as a free Android app. The […]
LitCharts Offers Guides to Popular & Classic Literature
LitCharts is a relatively new service that provides teachers and students with guides and summaries of classic and popular literature. The service currently offers more than 300 titles. LitCharts guides can be viewed online or you can download the guides as PDFs. To download a PDF you do have to enter your email address. The […]
ReadWorks Publishes Summer Reading Packs for K-12
ReadWorks has just released a new set of reading packs designed to help you keep your students reading through the summer. Like all ReadWorks units the articles within the reading packs are free to download and print. The ReadWorks Summer Reading Packs are arranged by grade level. Within each grade level you will find ten […]
ReadWorks Introduces ReadWorks Digital for Sharing Reading Assignments With Students
ReadWorks is a great service that I’ve featured in at least twenty blog posts since it launched a few years ago. ReadWorks offers free standards-aligned reading lesson plans for K-12 classrooms. In addition to lesson plans ReadWorks offers a huge libray of fiction and non-fiction literature that you can search according to topic and grade […]
Stackup – Create & Track Reading Goals for You and Your Students
Stackup is a new service that aims to help you give students credit for time spent reading quality articles online. On Stackup you can create reading challenges for your students. A challenge could be something like “read international news for 60 minutes this week.” After creating the challenge you invite students to join it. Students […]
Literature Map Helps You Find Authors You Might Like
Finding books that kids will like can be a difficult task. Literature Map is a tool that might make that process easier. Literature Map provides a web of authors you might like based on authors that you already enjoy reading. To use Literature Map just type an author’s name into the search box and webbed list of authors will be displayed. […]
Open eBooks – Thousands of Free eBooks for Students and Teachers
Thanks to Larry Ferlazzo this morning learned about a new program that will provide Title I schools with access to thousands of free ebooks. Open eBooks is a program organized by the White House’s ConnectED initiative. Through the program Title 1 schools as well as libraries, preschools, and community programs serving populations that have 70% […]
Newsela Offers Text Sets About the 2016 Election
Newsela is a popular service that aims to help teachers find current events articles that are appropriate for their students’ age and reading abilities. For the 2016 presidential campaign Newsela is offering a section devoted just to news about campaigns, primary election results, and caucus outcomes. The articles in the campaign 2016 collection come from Newsela’s […]
Newsela’s iPad App Offers News Stories Sorted by Reading Level
Newsela is a service that helps teachers find current events articles that are appropriate for their students’ age and reading abilities. This week Newsela launched a free iPad app and iPhone app. The Newsela iPad app and iPhone app delivers current news articles to students. The stories are matched to students’ reading abilities. At the end of each […]
ReadWorks Offers Articles, Question Sets, and Videos About Martin Luther King, Jr.
Next Monday is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. ReadWorks has put together a collection of articles, videos, and question sets for teaching about Martin Luther King, Jr. Like all articles and question sets found on ReadWorks this one is indexed by reading ability. The videos in the collection were provided by History. Applications for Education […]
Three Fun Phonics Games from Teach Your Monster to Read
For the last few years I’ve been a fan of the online learning game called Teach Your Monster to Read. The game is designed to help students improve the speed and accuracy with which they recognize letters and sounds. The game gets its name from the friendly monster avatars that students use in the game. […]
How to Gain Access to Thousands of Free eBooks for Kids
As I do every year, I am taking this week to relax, recharge, and ski with friends. While I’m away I will be re-running the most popular posts of the year. This was one of the most popular posts in October, 2015. Zing is a service offering thousands of free fiction and non-fiction ebooks to […]