Saturday, October 17, 2009

Context Organizer- One Strategy for Students with Reading Disabilities

For the past 1 1/2 I have been working closely with Henry Lewkowicz at Context Discovery to help get the word out about his innovative software application, Context Organizer. Context Organizer is Windows based application that can very quickly summarize information from various sources. In today's information age all of us are bombarded with information that is coming at us from all angles at the speed of light. But in order to keep up we must have access to this information and be pretty good at skimming and reading quickly all of the text. If we are on the web or reading a Word or PDF files we must be able to read quickly and absorb the information if we are to keep up in our fields. This is where Context Organizer comes in-imagine that you had this reading agent that could go through the document or the web site and summarize the information and pull out all of the relevant information and contextualize it for you. Well you no longer have to wait- you see Context Organizer is here and is your humble reading servant. For example you can go to a web site and click on the Context Organizer icon on your browser and voila- the web site contents are summarized for you to read. If you find that you need to delve more into the web site simply click on the link to take you there. Likewise, you can instantly send the summaries from Context Organizer to Microsoft Word for further review or editing. You see, Context Organizer is an invaluable and transformational tool and could be a god send for students and adults with reading disabilities who have to process a great deal of text. By combining Context Organizer with a text to speech tool, students could process that much more text, and get to the heart of the matter that much more quickly. Context organizer can also be used to search and summarize the contents of your Google searches eliminating the need to go to each and every site that Google suggests. If you like what you see in the search, read the summarization, if not discard it and move to the next summary. It is really that easy. If you would like to try out Context Organizer you can download a 30 day Trial from Context Discovery. You can also check out this video that I put together on using Context Organizer on the web.


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