Newesla- Techie Tuesday Link-up

That last few years, with Common Core  and PARCC*, I feel I am always looking for ways to have my students read more non-fiction and read more on digital devices. This great new website combines my two needs in one. Newsela, http://newsela.com, describes themselves as "an innovative way for students to build reading comprehension with nonfiction that's always relevant: daily news."  They offer news article under a variety of different categories for you and your students to read.  Each article comes with different Lexile levels so every student in your class can be reading the same article but on their own reading level.  After reading the article there is a quiz to accompany the article.

Go and create a free account on Newsela.  Then add your students so they can also access the website and news artciles.  Students do not need an email address.  Once on the website your students can access articles of their choosing or you can assign an article to your class at a certain Lexile level. 

The quizzes have multiple choice questions as select the paragraph to show your answer type questions.  This is great as it matches the PARCC sample questions.

*PARCC-The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers.  It is a consortium of 17 states and D.C. that are working together to develop a common assessment for math and language arts.  New Jersey, where I live and work is one of the 17 states.  

This test is taken online which means my students have needed to develop a new set of technological skills.  While they already use a computer to complete many tasks, there are many things they will need to do for the PARCC test that they do not regularly do on the computer: type out math facts, fill in arrays, use digital rulers or protractors, highlight text to show evidence, type without a pre-write, and so more.  Newsela will be an excellent for students to continue adjusting to computer based reading assessments.