Newsela

      Newsela is a news source geared towards students, but it is so much more than that. It creates a community of teachers and students.  It is an archive of primary sources and speeches. It enables teachers to create classrooms and monitor the progress of students. I am going to tell you how it can be used in the classroom and how I use it in my classroom.

      At the most basic level, newsela can provide you with news articles on all kinds of topics. It is arranged by topics of war and peace, money, kids, science , law, health, arts, sports, and opinion. You can also just search on a topic. News articles are listed
with info like suggested grade level, topic, subject, etc. A really awesome tool for teachers with these news articles is the ability to change the lexile level. Newsela allows you to change the complexity of the text so that you can differentiate based on your students' needs just with the click of a button. Speaking of differentiation, newsela also has a spanish mode which is great because teachers with ELL students know the importance of using their first language in acquisition of their learned language. Not only does newsela provide news articles, but they also provide speeches, biographies, primary sources, issue spotlight, info on careers, and myths & legends. Though news is its main draw, it is truly an informational source.

         Newsela provides an online program and activities that are already geared towards the classrooms. Teachers, we have very little work to do in using newsela. The wheel does not have to be re-created. With pretty much every article, there are accompanying activities. At the very least, there is a quiz, but there is also usually some kind of writing prompt and other various classroom activities. These activities are already geared towards reading and writing standards. In addition, newsela also has pre-organized text sets based on topics and they are arranged by subject. Access the text sets on social studies and you'll see topics such as the civil rights movement. Instead of searching the site for a civil rights article, you already have civil rights articles, speeches, primary sources, classroom activities, etc. already organized for you. Talk about an awesome resource!

     Newsela also provides a community for teachers and students. When registered by school, you are able to see what teachers at your school have saved as collections so that you can collaborate and capitalize on the ideas of your entire faculty. You are also able to create classes to sign your students up. Once your students are signed up, you are able to assign them texts by class. It is essentially like an online classroom. In doing this, you are also able to track the progress of students. You can see what texts that they have accessed. You can see how they scored on online quizzes and activities. You can read their responses to writing assignments. You can break their performance down by standards and see what areas you really need to work on in your classroom. Newsela is a fantastic collaboration and data-driving program.

How do I/would I use newsela in my classroom? My online classroom hub is google classroom so I branch students off from there. (1) Any time that we are talking about a particular subject in class, I would love to provide students more resources on the topic. Newsela allows me to do this. (2) When students are doing research, I suggest newsela as a source, especially for its primary and secondary sources in history. (3) Newsela allows me to integrate reading and writing activities in my content area. Newsela has already created these activities so this saves me time. (4) I use newsela to differentiate in the classroom as I vary the lexile level and, sometimes, language. (5) I use newsela to collaborate with peers and see what amazing resources that they've dug up, while sharing what I've enjoyed doing in my classroom. (6) I use newsela to provide ready made reading and writing data so that I know where my students are at and what we need to work on.

*For tech purposes, newsela has an app that works pretty well. If you are not in a place where you can go one-to-one when you would like, newsela works well with BYOD.