As part of my research for a news article unit I’m designing, I discovered Rewordify, an online lexile adjusting tool that will revolutionize your vocabulary instruction. You or your students can use it to make any text easier to read. Did I mention it’s completely free?
The site is called Rewordify and all you have to do is find some text somewhere online (or even on your computer), paste it into the yellow box on the website, and hit the Rewordify Text button. The site will return your text with the hard words replaced with highlighted easier words. It’s really that simple. You can then paste that text into a Google Doc, or other text editor to print for your students.
You can also adjust the difficulty level of the reworded articles in the settings section. While you can’t set a specific lexile level, you can adjust the difficulty of the words that the tool rewords.
Additionally you can add student accounts (No email address required!) through the Educator Central section of the website and have them complete this process with articles they find online. Update: Students can even enter a website address into the yellow box and rewordify will make the entire website easier to read! Take a look at my Rewordified website.
Once the site has returned your students’ text, they can click on the easier highlighted words, and a popup box will display the original term and a definition. They’ll have the option to add the word to a list that they can study later. Using a computer and headphones, students can study the words by listening to them, taking a very short quiz, and practicing using the words.
I tested the study tools, and I think they’re probably best geared towards the ‘upper elementary to middle school level students. That said, the Rewordify tool itself would significantly help high school students who need to work on their vocabulary. I’d recommend instructing students to find newspaper article of interest to them, then using the rewordify tool to learn the words they don’t know yet.
Learn more about how to start using this tool here:
- First time user guide
- Printable quick start guide (PDF)
- Printable student account guide (PDF)
- Convince your colleagues with this printable handout
- Find more guides and lesson plans here
Or just watch the following video…
Let me know below how you have used this tool!
Hey I’m a 8th grade teacher and rewordify helps my students change text into their “own” words when they need help. This a great jump off point for rewording, and it helps them understand how to actually put things into your own words. I have recommended this site to so many students and teachers and I hear nothing but raves about it. You should defiantly try this if you want your students to start putting things into their own words. Love this!
Hi Sarah!
Thank you very much for sharing how you use Rewordify. I am wondering how you help your students recognize when the tool is producing a poor quality paraphrase?
I ask because I tested the paraphrasing capability of Rewordify and other online paraphrasing tools with a paragraph from an online news article. Across the board, I saw that all those tools used a simple word-replacement method of paraphrasing that resulted in a very low quality revision.
I used to be a web designer, and in that capacity, I frequently ran across websites that employed “article spinning” techniques to create unique versions of content in an effort to cheaply inflate their search engine rankings. Basically, those webmasters used software to paraphrase entire articles so that search engines would think the content was unique. Unfortunately, it’s very obvious to human beings that the content has not been generated by a human being.
Here is an example from GoParaphrase.com. The original article:
And the “spun” version:
What techniques do you use to help them move from (or avoid entirely) this low quality paraphrase to one that expresses the main idea of the original content in their own words?