Our upgrade is finished!

We just completed the biggest-ever upgrade to Rewordify.com. A big thanks to all the users who wrote in and suggested features; most of them have been incorporated into the site!

Some of these features are so important to you, that we made them live before all the documentation is complete. There's a video on the home page, new information on the Help page (formerly the Details page), and on the Settings page.

We are working hard to update the documentation for the new features; look for an expanded and easier-to-navigate Help page, as well as new information on the Teacher page and in this blog in the next week.

Here's a list of the new and changed features:

• The site now speaks hard words out loud. This great new feature is available after you rewordify a block of text, and it works on the Flash Cards and Online Quiz. Read more.
  
• You can now choose from six different rewordifying levels, to match the output text difficulty and vocabulary list difficulty with a broad range of readers.
  
  The "Maximum" choice (one of the six difficulty levels) uses very short definitions that significantly simplify text, but may remove some meaning from the text.
  
  The remaining choices (Level 1 through Level 5) use more descriptive definitions that help explain in more detail what many words mean. As the level goes up, the words that are targeted for rewordifying get harder and harder, to allow the site to adapt to different reading levels.
• You can now print the rewordified text; there's a "Print text" link at the top right of all rewordified text.
• We now show a READ level (the Rewordify.com Estimated Average Difficulty level), our highly valid measure of text difficulty. It uses Brigham Young University's Corpus of Contemporary American English to determine the average log frequency of all the words in the blocks of text you rewordify. The READ level is strongly correlated to the Lexile measure. Read more about the READ level.
• We partner with the leading web filtering company to aggressively block school-inappropriate sites from being rewordified, and we also use our own proprietary filters to keep students safe while rewordifying web pages. Over 2,300,000 web sites are now blocked from being rewordified, and more are added every day.
• We added over 3,000 words and improved thousands of definitions in the Rewordifying Engine, and we continue to work hard at improving the site's translation quality.
• We made lots of other design and programming changes to make the site work faster and better.

Please watch the video on the home page and contact us with any questions or concerns. We're going to update a number of blog entries in the near future to reflect the site features.

Happy rewordifying!