Earlier this week, Karen Janowski shared a powerful free resource that has great potential to benefit all learners, and I agree with Karen that everyone ought to know about it.
Read&Write for Google Docs is a study skills toolbar from textHELP that is now available for free as an add-on for Google Chrome. (This is yet another reason for adopting Google Chrome as your browser!) The functions available on the toolbar are shown below. At the bottom of the post are two videos. One is a tutorial by textHELP, the developer of the toolbar. The other is Karen Janowski’s introduction to Read&Write for Google Docs.
![]( "Read&Write for Google Docs 01")
Dictionary
![]( "Read&Write for Google Docs Picture Dictionary 01")
Picture Dictionary
![]( "Read&Write for Google Docs Read 01")
Read – Pause Reading – Stop Reading
![]( "Read&Write for Google Docs FactFinder 01")
Fact Finder
Select word, click on this icon and go directly to Google search results for the word.
![]( "Read&Write for Google Docs Translator 01")
Translator
![]( "Read&Write for Google Docs Collect Highlights 01")
Collect Highights ![]( "Read&Write for Google Docs Vocabulary 01")
Vocabulary
Both of these features rely on highlighting within a document. Google Docs’ highlight function would not work properly for me, so I was unable to test or demonstrate these features. Both toolbar functions are demonstrated in the video below.
