Wayground's Chrome Extension: Differentiate Any YouTube Video, Article, or PDF in Under Two Minutes

Most K-12 classrooms have a five-to-seven grade reading level spread. You've found the source you want to use: a YouTube video that explains the concept better than your textbook, an article with exactly the right context, a PDF your district provided, a document you wrote and refined over three years. The problem is that one source doesn't reach thirty students at seven different reading levels. Rewriting it three times isn't realistic. Searching for pre-leveled alternatives that cover the same content usually isn't either.

Wayground's Chrome extension solves this by sitting in your browser sidebar. You open the source. The extension reads it. In under two minutes, you have below-level, on-level, and above-level reading versions, comprehension questions calibrated to each level, vocabulary flashcards, and a formative quiz — all assignable to Google Classroom without leaving the tab.

What Wayground's Chrome extension does for differentiation

How Wayground's sidebar works in your browser

Wayground's AI extension works as a sidebar in your browser. It activates on YouTube videos, webpages, PDFs, and Google Docs. You don't open a separate platform, copy text into a different tool, or export and re-import files. The source you're already looking at is the input.

From any of those source types, the extension generates:

• ›Below-level, on-level, and above-level reading versions — simplified sentence structure, vocabulary scaffolding, or extended analysis prompts, depending on the level
• ›Comprehension questions at multiple difficulty levels — from recall through Bloom's higher-order thinking
• ›Vocabulary flashcards for pre-teaching or review
• ›A formative quiz assignable directly to Google Classroom

All of these outputs are available in the same sidebar session. You're not running a separate tool for the quiz and another for the leveled text. Everything comes from the same source, generated together.

Wayground's AI content generation also supports over 200 languages, which means differentiation for multilingual learners isn't a separate workflow. The same article your general education students read in English can be generated in a student's home language with vocabulary scaffolding included.

From a YouTube video

YouTube is one of the most widely used instructional resources in K-12. Teachers find videos that explain concepts more effectively than a textbook paragraph. What's been missing is a way to turn that video into accessible materials for every learner.

When you open any YouTube video with Wayground's Chrome extension active, the sidebar reads the video transcript. Select the differentiation options you want — reading levels, question difficulty, quiz length — and the extension generates a leveled reading passage, comprehension questions at three difficulty levels, and a formative quiz. The teacher doesn't leave the YouTube tab. The student gets a format they can actually work with.

A 7th-grade science teacher opens a video on the water cycle. Her class has students reading from 4th-grade level to high school level. She activates the Wayground sidebar. In under two minutes: the student reading three levels below gets a simplified passage with sentence starters and guided questions; the on-level student gets the adapted transcript with comprehension checks; the advanced learner gets higher-order analysis questions that push toward application. All three worked from the same video. None of them needed a different source.

From an article or webpage

The same workflow runs on any URL. Open a news article, a Wikipedia page, an educational site, or a primary source document. Wayground's extension reads the page content and generates leveled versions in the sidebar.

For multilingual learners, this is where the language support matters. Wayground supports over 200 languages for AI-generated content. The same article your on-level students read in English can be generated in a student's home language — Spanish, Vietnamese, Haitian Creole, Arabic — with vocabulary scaffolding included. Differentiation here isn't just about reading level; it's about language access.

No additional tool. No separate step. The extension handles both in the same session.

From a PDF

District-provided assessments, textbook chapters, primary source documents — much of what teachers work with is in PDF format. Wayground's extension handles PDF uploads the same way it handles web content: upload the document to the sidebar, select differentiation options, and generate.

For students with IEPs, this is particularly practical. Wayground's Central Accommodations let you set student-level supports once — they apply across all assignments. For PDF-sourced content, the extension generates a modified version with chunked paragraphs, simplified sentence structure, and guided response prompts, while keeping the content aligned to the same grade-level standards the rest of the class is working from.

A resource teacher working with a 10th-grade history class has a primary source document — a two-page excerpt from a 1960s civil rights speech — that her district provided in PDF format. Most of her students are working on grade level, but six are reading significantly below it, and two are multilingual learners who process the content better with vocabulary support. She uploads the PDF to Wayground's sidebar. In under two minutes, she has a grade-level version for most of the class, a below-level version with chunked paragraphs and sentence-level glossary for the six struggling readers, and a version with vocabulary scaffolding in both English and Spanish for her multilingual learners. All three are assigned to Google Classroom from the same sidebar session.

From a Google Doc

Teachers build strong materials over years. Units they've written, articles they've adapted, discussion guides they've refined. Wayground's Chrome extension works on Google Docs too. Open the document, activate the sidebar, and differentiate your own resources for the range of learners in your current class.

This makes differentiation iterative rather than one-time. A resource you used last year can serve this year's students with different needs without starting over. You're not searching for a substitute. You're updating what already works.

A 5th-grade ELA teacher has a close-reading guide she's used for three years. This year her class includes four students reading below grade level and three multilingual learners who joined mid-year. She opens the guide in Google Docs, activates Wayground's sidebar, and generates a below-level version with simplified sentence structures and sentence starters for the four struggling readers, plus a version with vocabulary support in Vietnamese for two of her multilingual learners. The core content — the same text, the same argument, the same learning objective — reaches every student in her class. She didn't search for alternatives. She differentiated what she already had.

Beyond reading levels — what else Wayground generates from one source

Reading level adjustment is where AI differentiation starts. It's not where it ends.

From the same source, Wayground's extension generates:

• ›Comprehension questions across Bloom's Taxonomy — from knowledge and recall through analysis, evaluation, and creation
• ›Vocabulary flashcards for pre-teaching key terms before the reading or reviewing them after
• ›A formative quiz that auto-grades and syncs directly to Google Classroom

All of these outputs are created in the same sidebar session from the same source. You're not opening a separate quiz builder, a separate flashcard tool, or a separate question generator. Wayground's AI Differentiated Versions feature handles all of it in one workflow.

This matters because differentiation that stops at the reading level still creates an assessment gap. If the text is easier to read but the quiz is the same for every student, you've adjusted the input without adjusting the measure. Generating leveled questions alongside leveled text closes that gap.

A 2015 meta-analysis published in the Review of Educational Research found that students who receive instruction matched to their current level of understanding make significantly faster gains than those working either above or below their zone of proximal development. The implication for differentiation is that the source isn't the only thing that needs to be leveled — the questions that follow, the vocabulary work, and the way comprehension is assessed all need to match where the student is starting from. Wayground's extension generates all of these together, from the same source, in the same session.

What stays with the teacher

Wayground's extension generates the options. The teacher decides who gets what.

Knowing which students need the below-level version, which multilingual learners need language support, which advanced students are ready for higher-order analysis — that's instructional judgment the extension doesn't have. It creates materials that would otherwise take hours to produce. The teacher applies the knowledge of their students to decide which version reaches which learner.

According to a 2021 RAND Corporation study of the American Teacher Panel, teachers spend an average of seven to ten hours per week on lesson preparation and differentiation tasks. That time includes the searching, the rewriting, and the adaptation work that Wayground's extension now handles in under two minutes. What it can't handle is the placement decision — which student needs which version. That decision belongs to the teacher who has watched this student work all year.

Wayground's Central Accommodations let you set student-level reading level targets and supports persistently — so the extension can pre-load the right defaults for each student. But the final call on what each student receives stays with the teacher.

The extension is a generation tool, not a placement tool.

The source you have is enough

Differentiation used to begin with searching — hunting for pre-leveled alternatives that might cover the same content. Wayground's Chrome extension changes the starting point. The source you already found is the input. The levels are the output.

Open it. Activate the sidebar. Two minutes later, every learner in your class has a version they can access.