DOGO News

DOGO News is a web-based source for articles on current events. Articles can be searched in grade chunks from K-12 but will most likely engage upper elementary and tweens the most. Content ranges from serious to silly and is broken out into current events, science, social studies, world, environment, sports, video, and fun. Articles are several paragraphs long, and spiced up every few paragraphs with an image, infographic, or video.

Quizzes and questions that can be assigned online or printed are included for each article with the PRO subscription. These help assess reading comprehension, critical thinking, vocabulary and parts of speech, and general content. While the assessment questions are a good starting base, teachers will want to develop further questions or activities to get students thinking more deeply. Articles also feature comments sections where students can discuss what they've read and perhaps think more critically. Spanish options in the PRO subscription transform DOGO News into a truly bilingual site that goes beyond article text translation. There's Spanish narration for all articles, and assignments are in Spanish too. Combine this with the way the listening mode highlights the sentence as it's read, and you have useful supports for Spanish-speaking ELLs. The videos and text within infographics, however, aren't translated. In terms of equity, there are also offline resources available for purchase, which could be helpful for homeschool or for families without computer access at home.

DOGO News offers strong content variety, making it useful for various subjects from science and Spanish to social studies and language arts. Pretty much any class that regularly integrates or wants to increase use of scholarly current events, research skills, or Spanish can find an article that'll pique students' interest. And since the site is regularly updated, classrooms can return to DOGO News through the year and make it a core part of their curriculum.

DOGO is one of many student- or kid-focused news sites, but what's special about it is its combination of regular updates and supports for readers. Every DOGO News article features multiple strong visuals (maps, infographics, photos, or videos). These help to enhance the content and encourage students to continue reading and understand what they've read. Videos are short and tend to be interesting, but they may or may not have captions, since they're curated from various other outlets. There are also bolded key terms that students can click on to get a dictionary excerpt. The standout support feature, though, is the audio feature that reads text aloud and highlights the text. This feature is available in both English and Spanish. A feature like this is commonly found in more robust e-readers but not in news sites. Other premium features, like the ready-to-go assessments, serve multiple purposes. They're efficient comprehension checks as well as grammar and vocabulary builders. The critical-thinking challenge is a good reminder to students to push beyond recall, but these are limited to one question per article, which some teachers may find lacking.

The articles themselves cover a wide range of topics and feature a healthy amount of diversity, including representation from different cultures and global contexts. Unlike some competitors, DOGO News also has articles that dig into controversial or challenging political topics like police brutality and reform. Teachers should note, however, that while these articles are written by professional writers, the writers aren't necessarily journalists.