Elisa Balbuena - ILA Newsletter Weekly Project: Effective Literacy Website #1

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Elisa Balbuena

ILA Newsletter Weekly Project: Effective Literacy Website #1

            CommonLit (https://www.commonlit.org/en) is a non-profit organization that provides reading passages and literacy resources to students for free. The website and organization were founded by Michelle Brown after she experienced firsthand what many students in US schools go through with outdated and damaged resources, or even no resources at all, in the classroom. The website hosts a wide variety of texts fitting for students in the 3rd- to 12th-grade, with focus on many different genres, themes, literary devices, and learning standards. The website even provides resources written in Spanish to reach many ESL students in the US.

            Navigating CommonLit is very easy. Teachers can sign up for an account and gain full access to all the resources available on the site to start assigning texts to students. There are many text sets available on the website, but the resources are flexible enough that teachers can pick and choose which resources to use in their lessons. Additionally, teachers that use Google Classroom can import their already existing classes and students and sync assignments given from CommonLit to the Google platform easily. CommonLit has also released a new feature called CommonLit 360 Curriculum, which provides a full-year English Language Arts curriculum for grades 6-10. The curriculum is comprehensive and scaffolded and can be printed for students who do not have access to a laptop or computer. Most importantly, like everything else on the website, CommonLit 360 is completely free.

            The resources provided by CommonLit include short reading passages to full-length novels and plays that are ready to be used in the classroom. Many texts are bundled together into a set on a given topic, which makes unit planning a breeze for teachers using the platform. On the student side, the resources are provided in a clean and minimalistic layout. There are many accessibility options available for students, such as a way to increase or decrease text size, have the story read aloud, or even have the text translated into many different languages. These are great for students with IEPs, or English Language Learners or students of English as a Foreign Language. Students are also able to highlight and annotate text as they read with CommonLit’s built-in software. Guided reading questions are also built into the text, and parts of the story after the question are blurred out until the question is answered correctly to help students focus. For target vocabulary, there are indicators in the text that students can click on to learn definitions as they go to increase comprehension.

            CommonLit provides a plethora of resources with built-in teaching tools at no charge. The simplicity and ease of access to such resources, as well as the tracking and monitoring features that the website provides, frees up valuable time that teachers can use to give more attention to their students who need extra guidance. In short, CommonLit is a fantastic literacy website for teachers to use in their classroom.

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