Newsela

Commonsense Education describes Newsela as " An innovative tool for delivering high-interest, cross-curricular nonfiction texts to students, right at their reading levels. " Quizzes are provided that consist of mainly multiple choice questions. However, there are some that ask the student to select text to support a statement. Newsela is great resource to teach close reading techniques.

Newsela provides articles in six subject areas: Arts & Culture, Science & Math, Religion & Philosophy, Government & Economics, Geography, World History, and U.S. History. You can also search more current articles under the News tabs. Those topics include: War & Peace, Money, Kids, Science, Law, Health, Arts, Sports, and Opinion. Newsela also provides text sets. A text set is a collection of articles that share a common theme, topic, or standard. A bonus is that Newsela does provide articles in Spanish.

Newsela does not provide articles for every subject area. Computer Science is one subject area that is not in Newsela's Library.

There is a free version and a pro (paid) version. The features that are provided with the free version include:

• Students and teachers can access all articles
• Students can take quizzes
• Teachers can assign articles with one click
• Teachers can sign up for daily "articles of the day" emails
• Teachers and students can create annotations
• Teachers can view class-wide dashboards

The pro version adds:

• Teachers can view student progress
• Students can see their teacher's annotations
• Teachers can see their students' annotations
• Teachers can choose to hide or show their annotations to students
• Students and teachers can reply to one another's annotations
• Teachers can view individual student progress
• Teachers can track student, class and school progress against Common Core standards
• Teachers can sing up for weekly insight emails
• Teachers can sort and filter students performance data and print reports
• Students can take constructed response writing assessments
• Administrators can view consolidated school-wide and district-wide data

To learn more about Newsela, you can view to video below: