What is Newsela?

Have you ever found an article that you wanted to share with students, only you knew the reading level was too difficult for some? What did you do? Did you just give it to some students, or try to find an easier article on the same subject to give to the remaining students?

With Newsela, this dilemma is a thing of the past. The site houses a big collection of current events articles from sources like the Washington Post and the Associated Press. For each article, the Newsela staff has adapted it for five different reading levels, allowing readers to simply select the level they want and read the same content written in language that’s the best fit for them.

Newsela is a nonfiction reading site where readers can access real news articles, then adjust them to match their reading level. With a free account, teachers can create classes of students and assign specific articles to those students, or students can find articles on their own. All readers can use the annotations feature to take notes on the text, organize articles into their own personal text sets, and take the built-in quiz that goes with each article and get immediate feedback on how they did.

This tutorial shows you how to use Newsela to target reading strategies through text annotation, writing prompts, guided text reading, reading with a purpose, and text sets.

Created by J Huff