Read Thoery

Product Description:
This is a website where it will assess student reading levels, comprehension level, and standard achievement.

Glitchy Review:
I found this website via a colleague of mine. I was intrigued at first and decided to try it out with my students. Might I say I am HAPPY to have done it! This website allows teachers to assess student reading and comprehension level; along with standard achievement! Who could argue with that?

This website is super easy to use for both teacher and students to use. All you really need to do is set up your class and then have them go! I signed my class up last week and it began with an initial assessment and results begin. Now to really see information about your students you really want them to take about 2-3 quizzes. As the students take more quizzes the more information the teacher gets. I was able to see grade level performance, Lexile levels, and mastery of ELA standards. You are able to see this overall for your class as well as for individual students. (Hello RTI/SST data!)

The graphs the teacher is able to see are easy to see and read. In addition, should you wonder about something on the graph you can always hover over the information and it will tell you! The graphs are broken down into pre-test results with current quiz results incorporated. All these graphs are great, but when you get to the individual student information THEY GET BETTER! Didn’t think this could happen, but it did!

When you choose a student you are able to see the grade level, Lexile level progression, and the ELA standard performance. The best part is at the bottom of the page where you are able to see the results of each individual quiz the student takes. This is where the product gets better. The breakdown of the quizzes allows you to see the percent and if their reading level changed based on it. PLUS as the teacher you are able to click on the quiz to see the passage given, questions asked with the student’s answer and an explanation of the answers. This allows me so much insight into what my student’s know; don’t know, if they have a skill they are lacking, or if they are struggling with reading and comprehending questions in and of themselves.

Since using this program I have coupled this with Newsela and Front Row to really allow me to alter reading, reading comprehension and lessons to each individual student. I am able to make my small groups and individual work even more effective to aid my students. Needless to say, I am a happy teacher! By the way, did I happen to mention this website is FREE?! Excited yet?

User Rating:
I give this website a level 1 since it is so easy to use. Should you get confused there are multiple help sections and pop-ups. There is no need to watch any videos to use this; which is great for teachers!

Glitchy Rating:
I give this website 4 out of 5. I only give this because I believe there is so much more this website could do.

Go check out Read Theory here.

Easel.ly

Product Description:

Easel.ly is an online program where you can make “presentations.” These presentations are more like digital posters you or your students can make.  https://www.easel.ly/

Glitchy Review:

After playing around with Easel.ly I was able to see the benefit of the program for teachers and students alike. For example, AVID schools this is great to create different types of one pagers or notes pages for students. However there were some reservations I had about the program.

First, the program is difficult to use and understand, so if you are a teacher with not so good technology skills STEER CLEAR of Easel.ly. As an experienced technology user I struggled with the program. With that being said I did have a couple of my students work on Easel.ly to see if they could do it. I did not give them directions, videos, or anything beyond what I wanted them to make. Here are the results: (left picture is start, right is after 1 hour.)

Student A start 

Student A after 1 hour

Student B before

Student B after 1 hour

As you can see the students were able to get something but the amount of time they need to acclimate to the program as well as learn how to do the different things was very time consuming. This is what they were able to do in 1 hour. While I am able to see the benefits of this program the amount of work which needs to go into it is not conducive to a classroom. For teachers it does offer them the ability to make unique posters for their classroom, you still run into the issue of printing them. When I asked the students what they thought of the program both stated it was "kinda easy to figure out, but it was still hard to use." Might I make a note that the students I gave this too are my "technology proficient" students in my class. I can only imagine how confused my other students would have been. This is the other factor to think about when using this program; each student's exposure and experience with technology.

Second, this program does not allow for the teacher to add students to their class. Each student will have to individually sign-up for the program. As a teacher this is difficult because while my district has Google accounts for all students, most do not. This begs the question of how should the students sign up?

Overall, this program has a great start for teachers, but after seeing everything it really is best for businesses. This program has not adapted enough to allow teachers to really use this in their classroom.

User Rating:

This program is a solid level 3 with even some of the most experienced users having issues the first couple of times out. This is not to say you couldn’t figure it out; it would just take you some time to do that. Let’s face it as teachers we do not have a lot of time left for things like this.

Glitchy Rating:

I would give this program a 2 because of the difficulty in use as well as the lack of real use for a teacher.