We're continuing our exploration of the Brisk Teaching Chrome Extension this week! Let's start of with a couple of scenarios:
You teach a 9th grade Earth and Space Science class. You find a great article from Astrology Magazine in the library databases, but it is written at a late high school/early college reading level. You wish you could make it accessible to your 9th graders.
You have a 10th grade EL student in your class who is an excellent reader in their home language, but is currently at about a 6th grade reading level in English. In your class, you are discussing the way TikTok is using advertising strategies to help their legal battle and you want your students to read this New York Times article. You wish you could find a way to make this article more accessible to your EL student.
The "Change Level" tool in Brisk Teaching can help you in both of these scenarios. Let's check it out!
Simply click the Brisk icon (wherever it happens to live on your screen):
If for some reason you do not see the Brisk icon on your screen, you can always go up to your extensions menu (the puzzle piece icon) in the Chrome toolbar - right near your profile icon. From there, you can select the Brisk icon and that should make it appear on your screen. I found that sometimes it doesn't automatically appear on database articles, but pushing the button in the extensions menu makes it appear.
In the menu, select "Change Level":
From here, you will see that Brisk estimates the reading level of the current text and then gives you the option to change the level and/or the language!
In our first scenario - we would choose 9th grade and leave the language as English. When you click the "Change reading level" button, it automatically opens up a blank Google document and starts with a link to the original article. It then begins "typing" its adapted content.
As if that weren't enough...once it is finished, you are provided with this menu that gives you the option to make adjustments (perhaps make it shorter) or even create additional content such as a quiz, a lesson, or a vocabulary list! Here is what the document looks like with the level adjusted and a vocab list attached.
In our second scenario - we have two options. We could keep the content in English and change it to a 6th grade level for our EL student. OR we could leave it at the 10th grade level and change the language. Or we could even do both so the student has access to the original English 10th grade level text, the same content in their first language, AND a lower level version of the English text. Here is what that second article looks like with the level unchanged and the language changed to Spanish.
Think about how you might be able to use the Change Level tool in your classroom to make content more accessible to your students. Test it out and remember, you can always make adjustments afterwards!
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