Newsela: Building Non-Fiction Literacy

Newsela  is a website that allows teachers to assign news that have been indexed to particular Lexile levels. The site also includes quizzes that are linked to the Common Core Standard for Reading Informational Text.  While in beta Newsela is free, the website indicates that they will eventually offer, teacher, school and district subscriptions. It's definitely worth checking out.

Once a teacher creates a Newsela account they can create classes. Students then create a Newsela accounts [they can use their Google accounts] and then register for a teacher's course using the code their teacher provides.

Once students and teachers are enrolled, it's easy to assign articles to students. Each article is written at five grade levels from 3 - 12. Based on content, not all articles are written at the lower grade levels. Teachers can add highlighting which students can see. Teachers can also view what students have highlighted in the article. The Newsela Knowledge base says that annotations and asynchronous threaded discussion boards will be added soon.

Newsela looks like a great way to get students reading across the content areas. If you are using Newsela let me know what you think in the comment section below.

Two more things:

If you are looking for articles with questions linked to particular anchors you can't search for them yet. But you can use the following link and replace the "2" with the anchor you are searching for.

http://newsela.com/articles/?anchor=2

Yes, you can use Newsela, and take quizzes using an iPad (they are still working on Android optimization).