Thursday, November 14, 2013

Common Core Literacy Tool

I started using this tool with secondary alternative education students to help them read and understand informative texts and convey their ideas effectively.

THE TOOL:
Newsela - Common Core Literacy Tool


WHAT IS IT?
Newsela builds close reading and critical thinking skills while giving your students a new way to climb the staircase of nonfiction reading comprehension, from fourth grade to college-ready. Articles are written at multiple levels of text complexity. Teachers simply click a button and the reading level is automatically adjusted.


FEATURES:
Newsela makes it easy to assign articles, review student quizzes and track Common Core mastery. Teachers can create classes, assign articles and assign quizzes to measure comprehension. The teacher dashboard lets you track assigned articles, review quizzes and monitor standards mastery. Students register for Newsela and create an account using the class code - no email necessary. Students are able to adjust the reading level of the assigned article which can encourage re-reading.  Teachers are able to see at what level the student read the article and how they scored on the quiz. Another feature is that articles are conneted to the Common Core College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards. You can see the standard by hovering over the anchor at the top of the article title. Progress on these standards can be monitored by individual student on the teacher dashboard.


HOW I WOULD USE IT:
Hold an interactive read aloud for the whole class.  Model fluent and engaged reading of informational text. Prompt students for questioning the text to push them to infer from the article and expand their comprehension. Take the quiz together as a class and then assign another article for students to complete on their own. After reading the second article have students blog about their opinion of the article. Students should ask a question at the end of their blog post to encourage commenting. Extension: Ask students to research a related news article and include a link to it on their blog post and explain why they chose it. SAMR LEVEL: Modification

COST:
Newsela is free


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