Many of our students offer various software for consideration. Some software we test, other times we just trust students. These speedreading applications for ipad may help you to improve your skills.
I think it would be compatible with this course, so:
Is this a good tool? (the concepts and techniques are quite similar to the lessons, but I might be missing something, and I don’t want to risk training to failure)
Interesting find. You can read some review of speedreading apps I found:
http://www.igeeksblog.com/speed-reading-apps-for-iphone-ipad/
This review shows you that there is an abundance of potentially helpful apps to choose from.
They claim they can help its users increase 3.741 times the wpm only investing 7 min’s a day over the course of 2 weeks… or 100% money back guaranteed (+50 usd if the goal isn’t achieved)
We did not have an opportunity to check it yet. 50usd sounds a bit steep.
We did not find this book provides anything above standard, but we do find it helpful to read complementary materials. I hope that with time this blog will have all the required attributes. Compare with
The mindtools site offers many interesting subjects, and if you want to dive deeper into one of those subjects I will write a post (write me to [email protected] )
If you’re wondering where the cover picture of the video comes from, it’s from http://iqmatrix.com ; these guys have an awesome collection of mindmaps.
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Mindmapping is not a core material of this course, just one of the related topics we mention briefly. There are many mindmapping sites with various pros and cons. Many people find mindmapping very helpful in the stage of generating markers and visualizing text structure. This approach was championed by Tony Buzan. You may try this approach. While this is a good training, a disclaimer: none of the authors of this course use mindmapping as their personal style of visualization/memorization.
Has anyone heard of Spritz? Seems pretty cool. I was able to go through 500wpm easily on their demo. http://www.spritzinc.com/#
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We discussed it extensively a month ago both internally between us and externally with our students and friends. Finally on 20 Mar Jonathan issued the following announcement:
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A note on newer “Speed Reading” Software
Many of you may have seen the latest app from Spritz, Inc, which went viral last week. This new app claims to help users “Speed Read” by displaying one word at a time, centered on the screen, at 200-500wpm.
Many of you have emailed or posted questions asking about this new tool, and so we thought we would reach out to our students and let them know our thoughts.
As those of you who’ve completed the course will no doubt know, this is an ineffective method for a few reasons
- The app does nothing to improve a user’s memory capacity
- The app does nothing to improve comprehension speed or to suppress subvocalization
- Showing one word at a time fails to train the eyes to expand their focus
- Relying on speed reading software leaves us helpless in a world that is still heavily paper-based
- The app is not yet integrated with the things we must read daily, such as newspapers, blogs, or email
- The app’s max speed is still significantly slower than successful speed readers, who usually reach 700+wpm
In our course, we recommend using the “Spreeder” tool, as it allows you to gradually train your focal width and has higher speeds.
In light of this recent article, we are also going to begin recommending the free “Acceleread” app for iOS. Of all the apps we’ve tested in the last 3 months, Acceleread is best in-line with the goals of this course, namely:
- Allowing the user to split the page into 3 “saccades” or columns
- Allowing the user to import reading materials effectively
- Allowing higher top speeds
- Providing games and training for actual speed reading learning
The best web readerFor everyone still looking for a browser reader, I highly recommend Evernote’s Web Clipper which sits in my chrome browser. No need to click anything, just hit the “~” key and it morphs the page you are reading into a clean readable format. You can even save it to Evernote after.
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Evernote is a very popular and wide-spread app. Most people do not know its advanced options. If you use the app properly it can be extremely helpful in your classes. There are many more Evernote hacks that will be as helpful for you as the clipper. Enjoy learning 🙂
We hope you found this announcement helpful, and we’re sorry for the long post.
AccelereadI’ve found this amazing app
I use it as training tool. Now I can read at 500wpm with 60% comprehension. My only concern is about their library tool: you can import epub from dropbox, set your speed and the number of the words on screen. Right now I have set 750 wmp and 4 words on screen. I was wondering if the word count is right or should I move it to 5. . .
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I would suggest to improve understanding to at least 80%. You should be in control of your speed vs understanding choice.
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Indeed, 500wpm is still pretty slow, and 60% is not all that impressive. Stick with the fundamentals of this course and don’t rely too much on crutches or gimmicky reading software.
Interval Timerhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaUe-Hf0uSM
Hey, everybody. I found this interval timer on YouTube. It might help with pacing when trying to do progressive overload with the card.
It simply beeps at fifteen seconds. It helps me stay honest when I’m moving the card on the page.
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Thank you for your post. When practicing alone it is too easy to cheat and any control mechanism is welcome.
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brilliant find!
10-Minute SuperchargerI have the 10-Minute Supercharger paraliminal cd by Learning Strategies but have never really used it. It sounds like it can help one to re-energize as effectively as taking a power nap.
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Does not sound reliable. I would not even try it. Use 10 min mindfulness meditation instead.
Reading Trainer by HeKu IT GmbHLast night, I purchased “Reading Trainer (Kindle Tablet Edition)” by HeKu IT GmbH thru Amazon for $2.49 USD.
A short description from their website:
Reading Trainer is an award-winning interactive educational software for the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Android and Microsoft Windows computers. 12 different kinds of playful exercises help you to increase your reading speed while improving your retention rate at the same time. Reading Trainer is also great to improve your foreign language skills, as it supports English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese PT, Portuguese BR, Russian, Turkish and Polish at no additional costs.
It has a “Training” section (12 different exercises: word pairs, numbers, letter jumble, text search, words, etc.) and a “PowerReader” section that allows one to specify 3 display mode options: # of “fixations” (or saccades) per row, # of highlighted lines, or # of centered words. The “PowerReader” section comes with several preloaded scripts and has a “text from clipboard” option that I haven’t figured out how to utilize yet. Not sure how it compares to the other speed reading programs out there? The Kindle price is right, though, and it’s definitely challenging me.
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Hi Dan,
I have this app on my iPad (early 2013) and must say that is an excellent app. I have differents apps and i think this one is the best and cheap on the Apple Store.
The positive aspect of this app is that Help a lot on the visual aspect, like fluid eyes movement, focus in more than one word, help to see the complete word and not letters, etc. I have improve with this app my wpm from 300 to 640 average (1100 wpm my best record) and 89% of average retention
The negative aspect is that the app does not teach things like markers and memory boost, very important in order to keep and understand the text that are you reading.
I just start this course, mean while i practice the memory, markers, etc. i will test again in the app to check my performance. I will post new message when finish the course.
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Hi Jochen,
VLC is a great player, though i personally have switched to MplayerX recently due to better subtitle support and keyboard shortcuts. I find it’s also more lightweight. However, because students would have to download the materials, we omitted these recommendations, since we feel most lectures these days are available via streaming media.
