Tech Tuesday: Readworks

It’s time for our second Tech Tuesday post and this one is dedicated to Readworks. If you’ve followed me for a long time, you know how much I love and use Readworks. It’s the best site for finding FREE text passages and questions for your students. AND since they created the digital site a few years ago, it makes it even easier to use during distance learning. I cannot begin to tell you how amazing this site is, but I’ll try my best to share my favorite features in this blog post 🙂

ReadWorks is a FREE site that has a ton of text passages, both informational and fictional. Here’s what I LOVE about this site:-

Passages are leveled (by grade level and/or Lexile Level)

-You can search by text type OR by skills! I LOVE using the skills feature to easily find a passage for whatever comprehension skill we are working on.

 -Each passage has a set of questions included-Some texts have paired texts that include a set of questions that you can use to compare the two texts.

-You can “bookmark” your favorite passages or passages you want to come back to.

You can visit ReadWorks here. The site is FREE and you can print and copy to your heart’s content like this:

or you can give students your class code and assign them digital passages/questions like this:

It’s the best of both worlds!

When you log into the site you’ll see this screen. The arrows are pointing to what I would call a dashboard.

1) If you want to see all the articles they offer, then click “Find Article”. That’s the page the screenshot above it taken from. You can sort through and filter out what you want and don’t want on the left.

2) If you save passages, they will be in the “my list” part of the site. This is like the “My Binder” part of the original site.

3) Assignments! This is the part of the site that you’ll be visiting the most! More on that below. 

4) Class Admin- This is where you go to see all of your classes and what students are enrolled in which classes. 

So here’s what the passages look like when you assign one:

The kids can highlight the text and make annotations when they click on the speech bubble. Here’s a look at a text that has been close read. 

Now, let’s jump into the ‘assignments’ link and see what’s so great about this site. 

This part of the site is where you can see what you have assigned to what class. You can also see how many of the students have submitted their assignment and how many have not. If you click on ‘class results’ you can see individual scores, as well as the overall class.

Once the students have submitted the assignment you can see which ones need grading. If you click “grade these” under the written assignments, it will take you to each students’ work. For this particular passage there were only short answer. 

This is my favorite part! It makes grading short answer responses SO MUCH EASIER! You can see each students’ answer and you can simply click “correct”, “incorrect” or give partial credit. As you can see, Chuck and Serena answered the question with TBE, but Blair did not. 

Once all work has been graded, you can see the overview to see which students missed what and their final grade. 

How great is this FREE site??? I just love how easy it is to use and how much valuable practice it provides the kids! 

Do you use Digital ReadWorks? What’s your favorite feature? Is there anything I didn’t mention that I should know about?? Please share!***This is not a sponsored post! I just really love this site and wanted to share with y’all!