Newsela

Technology: Newsela is brilliant! Newsela is a wonderful website that takes news articles from a wide variety of sources on a wide variety of topics and introduces them to students at a range of lexile reading levels. The reader can change the lexile level and the article will adjust in word usage, and sentence and paragraph structure. The content stays the same but the difficulty of the article adjusts per the level chosen. In addition, some of these articles have quizzes attached to them which allow students to answer questions about the article they've just read. In addition, teachers can set up classes that allow teachers to send articles directly to students and check their progress after. Articles are filtered through one of seven categories - War & Peace, Science, Kids, Money, Law, Health and Arts - and are updated at least once a week. Below is a view of an article about a Jackson Pollock painting Mural which shows you the basic setup of every Newsela Article.

Classroom Use: I would like to use Newsela as an enhancement to my classroom. I envision something called "Five Minute Fridays" where every Friday I pull up an arts article on Newsela on the SmartBoard and the class reads through and discusses the article. Then, as a class, we take the Newsela Quiz. This would be a easy way to introduce students to art beyond the classroom as well as cross interdisciplinary with Language Arts and depending on the article contents, potentially history and science as well.