Ed Tech & Digital Literacy Tips
By: Batoul Baydoun
Bring Current Events and News Articles With Leveled Reading to Your Classroom
This Week's Digital Literacy tips are current news in the classroom. In an effort to provide students access to reading material of various interests and reading levels, teachers seek the internet for a variety of text that can be adapted to a selection of reading levels. educators look for news article, and current events to share with their students to read; furthermore to engage students in learning about current events throughout the world. The ed tech tools below are my top picks for online news related articles for your classrooms.
Newsela has been popular for few years now. The site offers text at five different reading levels. Teachers can sign up for a free or the paid version. Elementary teachers can sign up for Newsela elementary version as well. You can learn more about the pro version here. As a teacher you could create classes and assign news articles to your classes. Teachers can also change the reading level of the text as well. Each article provides a quiz to check for comprehension and a writing prompt.
Jellybeanscoop Is one of my favorite news site that provides news articles for elementary students. Accompanied with quizes, vocabulary, and reading fluency recording option, jellybeanscoop could be a great digital reading resource for ELL students, your struggling readers, or those fluent readers. The stories are written at four different levels; They vary from beginner readers to advanced readers. All the stories are real and are provided with audio files. Click here for more info.
You may also like DOGONews as well. Though it provides a teacher and student account, this site does not have the differentiation in reading levels. It provides students opportunities to write reviews to news articles, books and movies. Teachers can select a news article and send it to students through google classroom or edmodo. Students can engage in discussions and collaborative writing about the topic, points of view, or opinions as well.
You have ipads in your classroom? check out News-o-matic app for quick and simple current events for your classroom.