Two New Tools to Help Students Enhance Their Reading Skill
November 11, 2016
As an important literacy skill, reading has been widely amplified in the digital era especially with the proliferation and widespread of digital texts. The web is teeming with all kinds of reading materials accessible to anyone with Internet connection. In a previous post we published here in EdTech and mLearning we shared with you a list of some key tools to use on your browser and today we are adding two more apps to this collection. The first app, Skimcast, will enable you to produce automatic summaries of web pages and PDF documents. The second app, Highly Highlighter, will help you highlight important parts of a web page and share it with others. Try them out and see what you think of them. Enjoy
1- Skimcast
This is an interesting tool that allows you to skim through and summarize long stretches of text into concise meaningful summaries. The process is very simple: just past in the URL for a web page or a PDF document and Skimcast automatically produces summaries of its main topics. You can then customize the length of your summaries as you wish. Skim cast also ‘ automatically lists the key themes in each document. Just click on a theme, and it’s highlighted everywhere it appears in the document.’
2- Highly Highlighter
Highly Highlighter, as its name indicate, is a Chrome extension that you can use to highlight important parts of a web page to share with others. Highly is also available as a mobile app for both iPhone and iPad so you can read, highlight and share with your friends on the go.
As an important literacy skill, reading has been widely amplified in the digital era especially with the proliferation and widespread of digital texts. The web is teeming with all kinds of reading materials accessible to anyone with Internet connection. In a previous post we published here in EdTech and mLearning we shared with you a list of some key tools to use on your browser and today we are adding two more apps to this collection. The first app, Skimcast, will enable you to produce automatic summaries of web pages and PDF documents. The second app, Highly Highlighter, will help you highlight important parts of a web page and share it with others. Try them out and see what you think of them. Enjoy
1- Skimcast
This is an interesting tool that allows you to skim through and summarize long stretches of text into concise meaningful summaries. The process is very simple: just past in the URL for a web page or a PDF document and Skimcast automatically produces summaries of its main topics. You can then customize the length of your summaries as you wish. Skim cast also ‘ automatically lists the key themes in each document. Just click on a theme, and it’s highlighted everywhere it appears in the document.’
2- Highly Highlighter
Highly Highlighter, as its name indicate, is a Chrome extension that you can use to highlight important parts of a web page to share with others. Highly is also available as a mobile app for both iPhone and iPad so you can read, highlight and share with your friends on the go.
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