NEWSELA for Research!

I went to use it today and found it very unwieldy and hard to use as an ELA teacher. I want to be able to practice targeted skills and since they took the reading skill search away from free accounts, I won't be using it anymore which is a shame because I loved it.

The range of topics and information is exceptional. It can be a beneficial teaching tool if you tailor its use to your students. We found that many of our students cheated on the quiz by getting answers from others or opening a private account in addition to their school account to get answers. By creating our own assignment and expectations, we got a much better idea of what students were learning and what they were not.

I love using Newsela, although it hasn't always been my favorite. I didn't like the grading format of it, and some of the quiz questions are not always reliable. However, the more I use it, the more I like it. I think a lot of that has to do with making my expectations clear to students, as well as modeling and guiding them through the program. The more I see it from a student perspective, the more I can see where student confusion might come in (such as titles of articles changing across different lexile levels), and me being able to fix that on my end. Again, the more I use it, the more aware I become of this confusion, and the more I can fix it. I have seen a visible score difference in the way students now read and approach an article. Their short written responses have changed because I was able to educate them and train them on how to do that through this program. Can CommonLit do that, too? Yeah, to some extent. However, the texts aren't as timely, and they aren't at varied levels.