News-O-Matic EDU

News-O-Matic EDU is a daily news and activity app for kids. Teachers and students can read a new current event article each weekday (every week of the year), answer questions, chat with classmates about the stories, and send comments or questions to the editor. Topics include everything from politics to pop culture to scientific discoveries.

A child psychologist reviews the articles for age-appropriateness, and each day teachers get a Teacher's Guide via email that has discussion questions, assessment questions correlated to Common Core State Standards, and more. A Read to Me feature allows kids to hear stories via a human narrator (not text-to-speech) as an alternative to reading them, and all of the stories are available in English, Spanish, French, and Arabic.

With a wide variety of topics and creative, current headlines, News-O-Matic EDU helps kids get interested in news and the world. Interactive features (videos, puzzles, games, a rating system, maps, discussion questions, chat, and more) engage students beyond the reading, and help them connect, for instance, an article to a map that places the story in geographical context. Questions and prompts focus on comprehension, though, and could offer a bit more deeper learning and critical thinking. The Read to Me feature -- which admirably features real human voices -- helps kids learn to correctly pronounce uncommon, subject-specific vocabulary related to news topics, including geographic place names, science terms, and more. Teachers can adjust the Lexile levels on a per student basis, but lower-leveled articles may not read as smoothly and are sometimes missing details found in the higher Lexile versions. The past two weeks' worth of content is always accessible, which is great for kids who can't check in daily or who want to reread an older article. The kid-friendly visuals, concrete ways to interact with the stories, and extra content for teachers make News-O-Matic a reliable choice for elementary classrooms.

While the content is impressive, there's some clunky and slow navigation, and students would benefit from clearer instructional supports. For example, when articles are read aloud, there's no animated cursor to show what part of the text is being read. Also, many of the questions ask students to reference other sections of the site/app (e.g., the map or slideshow), and it would be helpful if those elements were linked to from the questions, or able to be pulled up for side-by-side viewing.