TECH TOOL BOX
NEWSELA
The news articles span a wide array of content, including science, money, law, health, arts, sports, and opinion. The site provides high-quality nonfiction texts from media sources, such as the Washington Post, the Scientific American, the Los Angeles Times, and the Associated Press. An added benefit of using the site is that students not only practice reading nonfiction but also stay current with what is happening locally and globally.
Newsela provides real-time assessments of student comprehension through multiple-choice quizzes and writing prompts. Each article is accompanied by a four-item quiz that probes the following areas: what the text says; central ideas; people, events, and ideas; word meaning and choice; text structure; point of view or purpose; multimedia; or arguments and claims.
Students and teachers can also use Newsela’s built-in “annotation tool” as they read. They can highlight passages in articles, mark them with symbols, ask questions, jot notes, and write short summaries of important ideas. This is a great way for students to purposely interact with text, to promote their active reading, and to further their comprehension.
Newsela is adaptive, with each article accessible at five reading (Lexile) levels. The original article is used as the highest Lexile level. It’s then rewritten by Newsela staff for different grade levels, using a Lexile conversion chart available on their website. Teachers initially set the grade level for all students in their class; after a student has taken eight to ten quizzes, the site adjusts the articles to that student’s appropriate reading level—a continuous process based on pupil performance. This adaptive feature allows for an entire class to read and discuss the same content, while permitting individual students to access material at their individual reading level. To make its content accessible to more students, Newsela has also translated many of its articles into Spanish—again available at five reading levels.
Though nonfiction news articles make up the bulk of Newsela’s resources, the site also has a “library” that includes primary-source documents, biographies, famous speeches, and historical “Time Machine” articles. Each document contains a multiple-choice quiz and a writing prompt to assess comprehension.
Newsela provides both students and teachers with “binders” where assignments and assessment-related information can be stored. Teachers are able to view classroom-level data, including the number of students who have completed an assignment and the class average on a quiz. Assignments can be filtered by academic standard so that teachers can see how their class is performing on quizzes that address a specific standard. Students are able to view their assignments and individual assessment data in their binders.
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