My Take
As an assessment tool I appreciate the speed and ease of using Literably. It's nice to have the student's oral reading recorded so that I, or parents, can play it back at any time, as well as see reading errors marked. The same holds true to the ability to refer back to the retell. Literably results are comparable to those I get when giving a running record myself, so I trust the data from this software. It would be helpful if Literably changed the log-in method for students. Currently students need to enter their teacher's email address and then select their name from a drop-down list. For younger students correctly typing all the letters and symbols in an email is a challenge. In addition, there are only two books at each level (one fiction and one non-fiction). It would be helpful to have two of each so that if a student needs to repeat a level they can read a text they haven't been exposed to before.
How I Use It
I use Literably to efficiently assess student reading fluency and comprehension. Literably allows me to doing a running record on each student about every 6 weeks, without all the time typically involved in sitting with a student and scoring. Since it's so quick I can assess students more frequently than if I was taking class time for the one on one assessment. It's also helpful to alternate between fiction and non-fiction texts to determine if there's a difference in student comprehension between the two. Parents appreciated having access to the running record results, which I couldn't provide in as much detail when I was assessing manually.