What is Newsela? And Why This EdTech Tool Is So Powerful

What is Newsela?

At its core, Newsela provides differentiated articles that come with standards-aligned quizzes. Articles are pulled from over 100 reputable sources, including the New York Times and the History Channel. The articles are adapted to 5 different Lexile levels, empowering students to take charge of their learning and adjust the readability levels to maximize their comprehension. Students can choose their own articles or read articles that have been assigned by a teacher.

Quizzes

Make no mistake, the Newsela quizzes are rigorous. These challenging assessments offer an opportunity for students to closely analyze text and critically think about the answers. Newsela quizzes offer an outstanding opportunity to retrain our brains to deeply think about digital information. If we are going to measure their learning (and our impact) with digital standardized tests, we owe it to our students (and ourselves) to teach students how to apply their reading comprehension skills to digital media.

Annotation Tool

Newsela’s embedded annotation tool provides an awesome opportunity as it allows students to highlight text in different colors and make notes. Articles and quizzes can also be printed and used as a whole class instructional activity.

Videos

Newsela now offers videos to support student learning. These videos are great for teaching skills as well as for providing content information. For example, in the ELA section, you can find an entire video set to support Poetry instruction. The great thing about these videos is that they are interactive, pausing periodically to use multiple-choice questions to check for understanding.

Subject Area Content

Newsela has added a ton of articles that can be used to align with content and for building background knowledge. Content area articles are available for ELA, Science, Social Studies, and even Social Emotional Learning. Beyond content area articles, Newsela provides complete lesson plans. These lessons can include lesson objectives, compelling questions, graphic organizers, supplemental articles, and even extension activities. Seriously, these lessons are amazing.

Reading Skills Check

These assessments also let you know where your students stand in terms of progress toward mastery of reading standards. Assessments are available starting at the 2nd-grade level and come with 8 comprehension questions (as opposed to the typical 4 questions found with all other articles).

Also from Newsela...

Formative!

Newsela Formative refers to the integration of the Formative platform with Newsela content, allowing teachers to create and assign formative assessments directly from Newsela articles. This integration enables educators to leverage Newsela's differentiated content alongside Formative's assessment tools to gauge student understanding in real-time and provide targeted feedback.

There is a free version, but a paid subscription offers additional features. See options here.

What Formative can do:

Seamless Integration:
Newsela Formative provides a direct link between Newsela articles and Formative, allowing teachers to easily create formative assessments using Newsela's content.
Differentiated Learning:
Teachers can choose a specific reading level for the Newsela article when creating the formative, ensuring that students access content appropriate for their needs.
Real-time Feedback:
Formative's features, such as instant feedback and various question types, enable teachers to monitor student progress and provide timely support.
Centralized Platform:
The integration streamlines the assessment process by bringing together Newsela's content and Formative's assessment tools into a single platform.
Ready-to-Use Assessments:
Some Newsela articles come with pre-made Formative activities, allowing teachers to quickly implement formative assessments without needing to build them from scratch.
Focus on Instruction:
The goal of Newsela Formative is to empower teachers to make data-driven instructional decisions and adjust their teaching based on student needs.
Two-Way Integration:
While quizzes from Newsela articles automatically transfer to Formative, teachers can also manually add write prompts and potentially other formative activities from Formative into Newsela.

Also from Newsela...

Newsela Writing!*

What is Newsela Writing?

Newsela Writing by Newsela is a web application that helps students improve their writing. Students receive instant, targeted feedback on the foundational skills they need to build lasting writing skills across rhetorical modes and subject areas.

How do students use Newsela Writing?

Students use Newsela Writing to request and receive rubric-aligned feedback on their short answer and long-form writing any time they want, as many times as they want.

Does Newsela Writing use AI?

Newsela Writing uses AI to provide two types of feedback. First, Newsela Writing identifies different sentence types to help students learn the foundational components of academic learning. Second, Newsela Writing provides instant feedback to help students improve their writing based on a chosen rubric.

What's the best way to use Newsela Writing in the classroom?

Think of Newsela Writing as a writing feedback coach for students. With Newsela Writing, you can assign students a range of assignment types to make sure they have the practice they need to build lasting writing skills. Newsela Writing is flexible enough to use with existing curricula or with your personal writing assignments.

What is the reading level of the textual feedback that the student receives from Newsela Writing?

The student writer will receive textual feedback at the reading level that Newsela uses when recommending Newsela content. For example, if the student receives articles at a recommended reading level of 7th grade, the textual feedback that they receive from Newsela Writing will be at a 7th grade level.

Can Newsela Writing be used with English Language Learners whose spelling may be incorrect?

For the most part, Newsela Writing will not attend to spelling and grammar. The two exceptions are when

Incorrect spelling or grammatical errors interfere with Newsela Writing’s ability to understand what the student has written;
There are explicit expectations around spelling and grammar, such as in a “Conventions” rubric criterion.

*To use Newsela Writing, teachers must request an "add-on" to our current Newsela subscription. See Danielle for details.

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