Ken Jones’s Updates

Update 5: Newsela

Media embedded April 14, 2018

As we continue to develop a comprehensive online educational system, the list is continuing to grow with the number of teachers who have incorporated technology into their daily lesson. I discovered a pretty cool website that assesses the reading levels of student's and the name of it is Newsela.com. Newsela is a site that selects articles from online that asks questions which will provide the teacher with the knowledge of whether or not their student was able to comprehend what they just read. If the student's performance is low, this will then be an indication that Lexile level (word frequency, sentence structure, and word length), is at a rate a little too high for the student. The teacher can then adjust the reading level to any point where they will begin to see an improvement in the student. Over the period of an academic school year, the teacher will have the ability to adjust the difficulty level for the student so that the student will not have the opportunity to become confused and frustrated while at the same time the student will continue to grow and develop their reading comprehension skills.

Newsela has new adaptive reads from the subjects of ELA, Science, Math, Elementary, Math, and Social Studies. Each Newsela text is adaptive and offered at five reading levels, with an entire catalog of content differentiated for grades 2-6. Young learners never see articles about troubling subjects, so your search for content that is both engaging and age-appropriate is over.

Definitions in context.

Each article has 5 Power Words with student-friendly and level-friendly definitions. Students encounter new words in context and at their reading level. 

Low-stakes practice activities.

Students can complete practice activities after reading an article to build a deep understanding of word meaning.

Collect them all.

Students collect words and points to their individual Word Wall, where they can review the words they’ve learned at any time.

Minds lighting up now with analytics.

Track student progress and stay on top of their work like never before with powerful metrics and real-time notifications. Visibility just got a major upgrade.

Get them logged in — instantly

Newsela integrates with the Learning Management Systems your school uses. So sign in and rostering are a piece of cake.