Yesterday, I made a wonderful discovery that I expect will dramatically reduce some of my lesson prep. time. It turns out that a few of my favorite online ESL materials for intermediate and advanced learners have selectable text that can be easily copied and pasted into a Braille or word processing program to make Braille or large print.If the materials are downloaded as a .pdf file, you'll need to look for a text selection button like the one pictured on the right. If you don't see such a button, try downloading the following free program to give you more options with .pdf files.
Foxit PDF Reader for Windows: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/
Then visit some of my favorite online ESL materials and try cutting and pasting the text into your Braille program or into a word processing program to increase the font size. If you have other favorite online resources, please post them in the comments section to share with others.
Online Resources with Selectable Text
The lesson plans available on this website require a subscription, however, a few are available for free as samples. These lessons are appropriate for intermediate and advanced learners.
- These short, simplified news stories are followed by a variety of listening, conversation, vocabulary, and comprehension activities. Some also include audio of the stories (in a British accent).
News For You is a great print publication for low-level adult readers. Now they also offer a subscription service online with selectable text and audio files for all their stories. Appropriate for advanced ESL students.
This is one of my favorite sets of online lesson plans. These are arranged by heath themes and appropriate for intermediate and advanced ESL students.
- Topics Magazine is a compilation of ESL students' writing. These are good examples of description and opinion essays, appropriate for intermediate and advanced learners.
- This is a great food and nutrition curriculum for Beginning to Advanced ESL students. It includes detailed teacher lesson plans and simple student worksheets.
Hi Jessica,
ReplyDeleteHave you ever looked at http://www.readonweb.com/ ? It's an Internet Explorer plugin that will give you a "clean page" of text from any website. Might be useful if you want to grab online text and put it in a braille program. It can also read text aloud and zoom in on text to make it easy to read for people with poor eyesight. As far as I know it's for IE only (no Safari, Firefox, etc.) but it's a pretty slick little application - and free.