Printed text is a curriculum barrier for many students.  There are very few modifications you can make to a printed textbook

There are many ways to scaffold access to printed text, but this scaffolding does not eliminate the need for continued reading instruction, even in the higher grades.  The best scaffolds are ones that also continue to teach reading skills.  

A brief on reading from the Access Centre website summarizes several strategies that can be used to differentiate reading instruction.  The Access Centre also provides self-guided modules (ppt presentation and handouts) for teaching or learning about successful reading interventions.  Lots of practical strategies! 

For the student who needs to customize various aspects of the text, provide a digital text in a format suitable for the student and an application such as Word or Kurzweil 3000 that allows the student to change the physical attributes of the text (font style, size, colour, tracking, etc.).  Many ARC-BC materials are available in .pdf, .kes, and mp3 format.  Here is an explanation of the file types found on the ARC-BC website.  These materials are available to BC teachers only.

Many publishers are beginning to make their textbooks available in digital form.  This Pearson html text is designed according to UDL Guidelines and provides many options for perceptual and physical access.

For a student who cannot decode independently but is otherwise able to work at grade level, provide an etext version of the text and an etext reader.  In the project, we have been using Kurzweil for reading.  The free Adobe Reader has a built-in speech reader that will read its .pdf documents. (Link to instructions.) 

On the Windows platform, try WordTalk (Link to instructions) for MS Word or Natural Reader (Link to instructions).  On the Mac platform try the built-in text-to-speech reader, Natural Reader, or Ghost Reader. 

Paul Hamilton provides information about several other free text-to-speech tools on his udl4all wiki.

wikipedia common photo

Here's an interesting blog post from someone who really knows her way around a Kindle.  I just got one and love it so far.  I've discovered I prefer audiobooks for fiction because of the ability to express emotion and accents and the Kindle for non-fiction because of the ability to clip notes.  The ability to purchase and download books using the 3G network is amazing.  That seems to work fine in Canada but subscribing to blogs and newspapers does not seem to work here.

Ray Kurzweil will be introducing the free Blio reader later this year.  This software will run on a laptop or iPhone and come with a million free books.

Some students have great difficulty with digital computer voices.  One option is to purchase better quality voices from a site such as NextUp. 

Another is to use audio recordings of human voices. 

Volunteers at Librivox have produced human voice recordings of many of the classic literature titles in the public domain.  These are available for free download and vary in quality so check them out beforehand.  You can also create your own audio recordings or purchase high quality professional audio recordings of books that are not in the public domain. 

SET-BC has just produced a new guide to reading solutions for students with visual impairments.  The solutions were grouped into 3 categories:  paper, etext, and auditory.  All decisions regarding a student with a visual impairment should be made in consultation with the vision teacher. 

Kurzweil 1000 is designed for students who have visual impairments and may be a better choice for some students. 

Reading on the internet presents its own challenges.  Many add-ons which allow for customization and support of reading on the web have been created for the Firefox  brower.  Paul Hamilton explains many of these features on his wiki.

In addition to reading etext, screenreaders such as JAWS allow students who have visual impairments to navigate by ear in applications, operating systems, and on the internet.  The Voiceover screenreader is built right into the Mac OS and is available on the iTouch, iPhone, and iPad.  Screenreaders might also be useful for any student who cannot read the text necessary to navigate on a computer. 

Support students with continued instruction in phonemic awareness and word recognition.   Simon Sounds it Out is an excellent beginning phonics program.  Classroom Suite contains many phonemic awareness activities.  For older students, you can continue to teach phonics and phonemics awareness in conjunction with vocabulary study.

Most students need specific instruction in understanding how to use particular features of text such as the table of contents, glossaries, or chapter sub-headings.   

In the online meeting, Rae shared the THIEVES strategy  that her team uses for looking at features of text before reading.  Thieves is an acronym for:  Title, Heading, Introduction, Every first sentence in a paragraph, visuals and vocab, end of chapter questions, and  summary.  More information about Thieves is available at ReadWriteThink.

In this BC UDL LOR lesson, the teacher and class use the Bookmarking Feature in Kurzweil to identify important sections of an article.  The bookmarks are then used to quickly locate answers to study questions. 

Understanding literary conventions is also important to understanding text.  In this video, a group of students explains Super Awesome Spectacular Similes.  Although it was time-consuming to create this video (as opposed to filling out a worksheet), it is likely these students will never forget the concept.  In order to create the video, they had to understand the concept thoroughly and teach it.  We know that teaching is at the top of the learning pyramid but we rarely offer students a chance to teach.

Don Johnson's Start to Finish Series includes classic books and non-fiction books written at an easier level and presented in printed, audio, and digital form.  Your SET-BC consultant will likely have copies of these for you to preview.

The National Geographic Theme Sets provide themed materials and different reading levels.

Sparks Notes, Cliff's Notes, and Wiki Summaries all provide summaries of important literary works and other supports such as character and theme lists which help to simplify and clarify the structure of text. 

Educators have created a number of free downloadable texts using the CAST Bookbuilder.  Options include the ability to add avatars to guide student reading. 

Attainment has created a literacy-based math curriculum and science curriculum featuring textbooks with picture supports that conform to US curriculum standards.  The series was designed for students who have cognitive challenges.

Give students a choice of reading materials, such as magazines on a favourite hobby.  Manga are also very popular.  Song lyrics are motivating reading material.  (Just a caution...many of the song lyrics websites try to sell you ring tones and some lyrics may be inappropriate for classroom use.)   

Give students a choice of activities.  The following novel study units were designed to offer a wide choice of activities for a variety of learners:  Holes and To Kill a Mockingbird. 

There is a huge variety of electronic books available on the web at both free and subscription sites.   You could spend the rest of your life on Librarian Chick's wiki, browsing her list of books/audiobooks.

The Literature Circles approach focuses on common strategies and concepts but groups of students read books of their choice and could also take on roles of their choice in the Literature Circle.  

Research indicates that turning on the closed captioning while children are viewing television can improve their reading.  (National Captioning Insititute, 2004 and Feinberg, 2003)

Closed Captioning Flickr CC photo by kawaface (actually says "physically conservative" instead of "fiscally conservative" 

Applications such as TidyRead and Readability allow you to remove clutter from a web page which can then be imported to Kurzweil. 

Print What You Like allows you to choose the items on a webpage you want to print.

Provide a genuine audience for readers.  Students can read to seniors, to buddies, to younger siblings, or create oral recordings to be used by nonreaders.  Last year the UDL team in Prince George established a buddy reading relationship over Skype with a classroom in the southern US.  The team reported that the students used every spare moment they could find to practice their reading.  This was a great support for reading fluency.

Flickr CC photo by dkaz 

Sting like a butterfly, float like a bee!  In year 1 of the project, Beth used Karaoke to motivate her reluctant readers.  She used Mohammed Ali's colourful language (shown in a youtube video) as the starting point for a unit on Metaphor and Simile and students worked with the Karaoke version of the theme song from the movie.  Mohammed Ali wikipedia photo

The Reciprocal Teaching Method uses peer coaches to teach and remind students to use reading comprehension strategies.  At this site, you can download scripts for the peer coaches and printable bookmarks which prompt students to use 5 comprehension strategies.  The Thinking Reader Series was modeled on the Reciprocal Teaching Method.   

Another way to sustain effort and persistence is to adjust the difficulty of the challenge.  Graphic novels are extremely popular both because of the illustration style and the simplified language.  Julie reports success with the graphic novel versions of Shakespeare which provide a simpler, shorter version of the original. There are several other examples of simplified or shortened text under Options for Language above.

To adjust the difficulty of challenge, provide information at different reading levels such as a collection of different printed text on the same topic for research.  Websites such as the Naturescapes site offer multi-level readings on the same research topic. 

Students can keep track of books they are reading, review books, and connect with other readers on sites such as Shelfari.