Digital Reading Websites for Accessibility and Engagement

Common Sense Education is a nonprofit organization with a focus on providing educators, parents, and students with trustworthy information and reliable resources.  Each month, they send out a newsletter to educators highlighting valuable resources (you can use the link above to sign up if you are interested).  This month's newsletter featured a list called the Best Digital Reading Apps and Websites.  Here are my three favorites (and they are all free):


NowComment is a website that allows for engaging discussions of online documents.  Discussion can be tied to specific parts of the document, giving the teacher insight on what students are understanding and where confusion still exists.  Discussion window appears next to the text.  Teachers can sort comments in a variety of ways making it easy to gauge participation.

Rewordify is a text-leveling tool.  Simply paste your text or web address in the box provided and Rewordify will create an easier version making the text accessible to students of various reading levels.

CommonLit offers a collection of short stories, poems, and historical documents at various reading levels.  Teachers have access to lessons plans complete with reading passages and comprehension question sets that can be assigned to students either digitally or through printed text.  Struggling students can use support tools such as the ability to translate words into other languages, hearing text read aloud, and using a Guided Reading Mode with leveled questions.  Already using Google Classroom?  You can import your class for easy setup.