Jeremie De Leon: ILA Newsletter Weekly Project: Effective Literacy Website #1

 

Jeremie De Leon

ILA Newsletter Weekly Project: Effective Literacy Website #1

Newsela (https://newsela.com/) is a website that provides leveled reading materials for students from Kindergarten to 12^th grade. The website has mostly non-fiction articles that come from credible sources like The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Smithsonian, The History Channel, and so much more. There is also fiction, poetry, and primary sources types of articles. Each article is published at five reading levels and students can choose the levels that are the most appropriate.

Newsela offers a free and paid account. For the free account, you get the basic features like creating a classroom and assigning articles to students. For the paid account, you have access to assignment and reporting tools. Each article has a comprehension quiz that that promotes key reading skills. The most important feature of the website is that the content is updated daily with relevant and current articles.

The articles in Newsela are categorized by ELA, Science, and Social Studies. A unique feature of Newsela is that it offers a text set that allows teachers to assign ready-to-go lessons that support literacy. The text sets are created by certified educators and contain certain amounts of articles that can be based on themes. Teachers can also create their own text set by simply choosing articles they want as a set.

Each article provides a writing activity and a quiz that the teacher can check. An important thing to remember is that the teacher can only check the work if the article is assigned. The writing activity provides a writing prompt that students can answer, and the quiz has questions based on the article. Teachers can also keep track of their students’ progress in real time and get comprehensive reports about their performance. At the same time, students can also check their progress.