ILA Newsletter Weekly Project: Effective Literacy Website #7

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Balmeo, Shirley

ED 638






ILA Newsletter Weekly Project: Effective Literacy Website #7

News is the first draft of history...

    Newsela (https://newsela.com/) is an online news platform posting a variety of articles at different Lexile reading levels.  This platform provides high –interest, cross-curricular informational text to help improve student’s reading skills. The articles are updated daily in a cleanly designed website so that students are not distracted and are engaged with their reading.  Newsela also offers text in Spanish language for diverse learners.

    The site is valuable to literacy instructors as it offers reading comprehension quizzes, writing prompts, and annotation features.  Along with a library of articles, Newsela provides real-time assessments of student comprehension. Each article is accompanied by a four-item quiz that examines the following areas and skills:  what the text says, central ideas, people, events, and ideas, word meaning and choice, text structure, point of view or purpose, multimedia, and arguments and claims. 

    Students may use the “annotation tool” (an option within the platform) as they read by highlighting passages in articles, mark them with symbols, ask questions, take notes, and write short summaries of important ideas. This is a great way to promote active reading, and to further student comprehension.

    Teachers may also assign text to individual students or the class; either way, student progress is still tracked.  Many of the articles are also rotated regularly, including paired texts.  These provide targeted intervention and differentiation on specific reading standards.  

    Although many of the resources are informational text, there is also a library of primary source documents such as biographies, speeches, and historical articles, which are organized based on themes or content. Prior to SY 2019-2020, Newsela was a free subscription resource site.  However, after 2020, many of the free resources have been narrowed down and may only be retrieved by subscription.

    Overall, Newsela is an excellent online resource for classroom teachers.  Many of the free passages may still be used as a supplemental resource to promote reading and writing literacy. 

 


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