By Gabby Lembo

Why It’s Important:

Using tools in classrooms that allow all students to learn, no matter their abilities or disabilities is important. This allows all students to be engaged, understand materials, and also participate. Using some simple tools in your classroom can help students get a better understanding and also use these tools in the future. Some students need help in certain places, having these tools like speech- to- text, highlighting, or even listening options can really help students in the classroom! Lets learn more in depth about it and some tools I think you could look into!

Access Ability for Chrome:

This tool allows students to listen or summarize any text on websites. This can be beneficial for students who like to follow along as they read or if they have a hard time reading in general.

This website offers:

• Highlight bar
• Hover text speech
• Being able to change fonts
• Change background color and text

Input Tools for Translation:

This tool allows a translation feature and a writing tab for a variety of languages. Students can choose the language and have the ability to type on the keyboard. There are different menu options for accents. Translation tools for learning are beneficial for language barriers in classrooms or even trying to learn new languages.

Reworditify:

This online software is great for reading, learning, comprehension, and teaching. This tool can be used in various ways like teaching words, better vocabulary, engaging lessons, and improving learning outcomes. This can be both helpful for teachers and students.

Screencastify:

Screencastify is a great tool for making presentations, instructional videos, or explaining. This tool can be used for web cam recording, video editing, and makes your screen into a video. It is most used for tutorials, lessons, and can be uploaded to YouTube or shared with others.

Zoom Text

Zoom Text is an online magnifying tool to help people with bad vision. This tool can be used for text, images, and an easier time with online applications. This tool allows the users to zoom in from 1.2 x to 36 x. It also offers lens views, with just a magnified view of a portion of the screen. It offers color customization’s based on inverted colors and contrast, this can be beneficial for students who have a hard time reading with certain color schemes. Overall, this tool can be helpful for students who have bad vision or a hard time reading with certain colors.

Resoomer:

This is an extension you can download that summarizes lengthy online articles in 500 words. The summary concludes the main points of the argument and important facts. This can help students get the main objective, key ideas, and concepts without the unnecessary parts. This can be beneficial for students doing a presentation, essay, or even studying.

Move It:

This extension helps students incorporate breaks while being online. It is very easy to spend a lot of time on the internet mindlessly scrolling or working on assignments. It is easy to get burnt out or lose track of time. This tool allows a “brain break” to pop up on your screen when downloaded. Students can set the notification interval, this allows them to decide when they want the activity to pop up. This is a really unique tool and I can see how this can be helpful for students!

Conclusion:

Overall, these are only 7 different web tools I discovered and there’s tons more out there! These tools can be beneficial for everyone, or even students who need a little more support in certain areas. It is important to include these tools so every student can learn no matter what. Try checking some of these out and see if you would use them in your classroom or even everyday life!