On the eighth day of sharing...Newsela!

What is Newsela?

Newsela is a service aimed at helping teachers find current events articles that are appropriate for their students' age and reading abilities.  One of the most challenging aspects of nonfiction reading is finding nonfiction text at reading level.  With a wide range of reading levels in each class, it almost feels impossible at times to find nonfiction texts to meet the needs of all of your students.  With a lack of parapros in the classroom, creating differentiated reading groups (that stay on task) also feels difficult at times.  Newsela solves many of these issues!  

To learn more about differentiated reading with Newsela and Google Docs, please visit this blog post by Beth Holland.

Why is it AWESOME?

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You can search by grade level, reading standard, or language.

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You can look up articles by a range of different topics.

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Once you have found your article, you can differentiate by reading on different Lexile measures that fit your students!

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You can import your Google Classroom roster to assign students quizzes and to track their reading of nonfiction text.

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Students can answer a writing prompt on the article they read.  PRO educators can customize the prompt! This is great for short-constructed responses based on nonfiction text. If your school is like ours, preparing students for our Georgia Milestones tests require a lot of constructed responses and this is perfect!

6.

Everything your students do in Newsela is trackable through your BINDER. You can see how many articles have been read, total quizzes takens, and the percentage of proficient students.  You can also look at your indvidual students to see where they are mastering the reading standards.