Newsela is fantastic for informational text reading and finding details to support main idea.

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.

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.

It is not honest to say the whole site is free when it is not! I realize they need to make money, I just thought that Newsela was really digging in to help fragile, inner city learners.