This morning a post on the Free Technology for Teachers blog alerted me to a new Google search feature which will let you filter your search results by reading level. There are three generic levels: Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced.
In the Google web search forum and Google web search help, I didn't find any age/reading level correlations for these categories or information on how the levels are determined. I still think it's a tool worth investigating for many purposes. Educators might narrow down search results when they are looking for websites to recommend to their students. If students are taught to use the tool, it might save them time in web searching by filtering out sites that are likely to be too difficult for them to understand. Even parents might find this a useful tool for helping their kids with homework!
I have been wanting to try out a few different screencasting tools, so I took the opportunity to record a demonstration of how to use the new reading level filter using Screenr. Hopefully the quick demo below will start your wheels turning on how you might leverage this tool to your and your students' advantage. If it sparks any ideas, please share in the comments!
