Product Review of Raz-Kids

Raz-kids is a website built to help educators track their learners’ progress in level-based reading challenges that span 29 interactive levels. On the site, educators can easily track each learner’s progress with the eQuizes comprehension tests that come with the over 400 eBooks. More books are added every month. Students can be digitally assessed via the online records generated by the site after the learner take an eQuiz. The app aims to strengthen the connection between home and classroom by allowing learners to be connected to the learning resources at all times.
Website: https://www.raz-kids.com/
What Users Love About the App
“Teachers’ time is very valuable and scarce at times, so that is why using Raz-Kids is worth the time to set up for your classroom. Once everything is set up, the program runs itself without much teacher time in overseeing it.”
“Using Raz-Kids is an easy way to help my students begin using technology to enhance their learning and helps me provide for my 21st century learners! I highly recommend this site!”
“This website is an extremely useful tool in my classroom. The students were able to listen to fluent reading and to practice leveled reading without needing a teacher to work with them. Students were constantly receiving reinforcement in fluent reading.”
“The ability to differentiate the materials was extremely valuable. My special needs students were able to listen to stories on a very basic level (AA) while my more advanced students were able to move on to texts on levels S-T, all in the same room during the same time.”
“As 1st grade teacher in a 100%Language Immersion School (Spanish, we also have French and Chinese) consider raz-kids a wonderful option. You can find Translations to Spanish, French. Excellent, everybody wins: teachers, students and parents.”
What Users Dislike About the App
“The website is horrible! My 7 year old isn’t able to find the books she is required to read. I have to google the book and then login to find the books on your website. The categories for these books are incorrect. If children are using this website it needs to be more user friendly!”
“Assigning the work can be tricky, as there’s a lot of clicking around to be done (you choose the sequence, which can be time-consuming if you individualize instruction like we do). And at about $80 a year, this is also expensive.”
“Raz Kids is ok but could use improvement. For regular stories, the students should be required to listen to the story first. For flight checks, there isn’t even an option to listen to the story. There is no feedback for the students.”
“The grading for retell should be tailored better to each story. Sometimes there are not options for things that should be graded. When you click on a word that is pronounced incorrectly or substituted, etc… (while grading their reading), it goes back almost a full sentence when you are done. It should just pick up where you left off.”
“I did not like how students could choose themselves if they wanted the text read out loud. Sometimes, I would not want my students to have that option because I would want them to read it for themselves.”