Read and Write for Google: An Overview

Read and Write: What is it?

As educators, we have a classroom filled with students who have many different and varying needs. Each student has their own unique strengths, challenges, interest and needs that affect how they learn. Read and Write for Google is a tool that creates the opportunity for all the students in our classrooms the chance to express and show their ideas, contribute to the class, and engage with their own learning process.

Key Features:

Read and Write for Google is an incredibly useful tool that can be added to any students google chrome or gnspes.ca account. It offers a range of powerful support tools that can help the students in your classroom gain confidence with reading, writing, studying and research. Read and Write for Google is accessible in a web browser, in Google Docs, as a PDF reader and for epub files. As you read through the blog that we have created, you will get an in-depth look at what each function does on the Read and Write toolbar. Some of the key features of Read and Write for Google are:

• Text-to-speech to hear words, passages, or whole documents read aloud with easy-to-follow dual colour highlighting

• Text and picture dictionaries to see the meaning of words explained

• With speech-to-text, dictate words to assist with writing, proofreading & studying

• Word prediction offers suggestions for the current or next word as you type

• Collect highlights from text in documents or the web for summarizing and research

• Create and listen to voice notes directly inside of Google Docs

• Simplify and summarize text on web pages to remove ads and other copy that can be distracting.

Who does Read and Write Benefit ?:

This tool is an extremely valuable and beneficial tool for teachers in the classroom and will support a variety of student needs. This tool could benefit students who have difficulties in reading, writing, word processing, ADD/ADHD, Dyslexia, and fine motor difficulties. Read and Write promotes the opportunity to have a variety of tools at a students disposal to help aid in these processes. It gives students the confidence that they often lack, when they are presented with a task that they find difficult.

 

How can you access Read and Write for your students ?:

Read and Write is an add on that any student is able to access as long as they have a google or gnspes.ca account. This tool is added on to the students' account and will appear anytime they are logged in to those accounts, on any computer. In order for students to get access to this tool, you will need your assistive technology specialist to load this extension to their Google or gnspes.ca account.

In the Halifax Regional Center for Education, there are a number of subscriptions that the assistive technology specialist are given access to each year. If you think this is a tool that would benefit your students, you just need to reach out to them. Once the add-on extension for Read and Write is loaded on to the account, it will remain on the students account for the remainder of the school year. At the end of each year, the add-on is removed and you will need to put in another referral with you Assistive Technology Specialist for the following year.

Parent and Teacher Access:

You are able to find the Read and Write add-on in the google chrome web store under the "Extensions" drop down. The Read and Write add-on is offered by texthelp.com . Parents are able to start a 30-day free trial if they would like to test out the program. However, if it is something they would like to continue with, it then turns into a monthly subscription. Teachers can access Read and Write for Google by selecting the teacher option and filling out the submission page on the texthelp.com website. Teachers can have unlimited access to Read and Write once it has been installed.

The link to find read and write under the extension drop down is: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/readwrite-for-google-chro/inoeonmfapjbbkmdafoankkfajkcphgd