Newsela - Great Resource for Non-Fiction Articles

Getting Started with Newsela

Tracking Student Progress in Newsela

**Updated** I want to update this post after using this tool with a few 5th grade teachers in our district.  Newsela is even better than I thought!  You have the ability to assign students articles, but they can also choose their own.  From the teacher dashboard you can track which articles they have read.  There is also a new feature which allows students to annotate on the actual article.  Teachers can view student annotations from the dashboard and reply back to them.  This would be such a great tool to allow readers to track their thinking while reading. 

Close Reading Poster:

When I was in the classroom I was always trying to find non-fiction articles that connected to what we were learning about.  I was working with a team of teachers yesterday and Nicole Vagle shared a great resource to access free non-fiction articles.  The site is Newsela - "Newsela is an innovative way for students to build reading comprehension with nonfiction that's always relevant: daily news." This site has articles for grades 3-12.  You can use this for whole group instruction or create accounts for students and assign articles for them to read.

Here are some of the really cool features this site has to offer:

•  Articles written at multiple levels of complexity-as a teacher you can choose a version of the article to fit each student
• It has quizzes aligned to the Common Core to track students progress
• Newsela also has a teacher dashboard to track Common Core mastery, review quiz results, and assign articles

Google Lit Trips

This weeks tech tip is going to focus on Google Lit Trips- which are free downloadable files that mark the journeys of characters from famous literature on the surface of Google Earth.  Each location along the journey has resources, thought provoking discussion questions, and real world applications from the text.  Its goal is to place the readers “inside the story” traveling alongside the characters.  They want to stimulate higher level thinking skills and connect the text to issues of the real world.

GLT Overview: Animation Demo from GoogleLitTrips on Vimeo.

You can also have your students create their own tours at Google Earth Tour Builder.  Here they will be able to create a tour just like in the video above.  I have included an 8 minute video explaining how to use this new tool below:

 

Integration Ideas:

     -Map a characters journey after students finish a book 

     -Create an interactive journey about famous people in history

     -Plot distances in math class

     -Map weather

Please share in the comments section below if you have any other ways you use Google Lit Trips in your classroom.

Flipgrid

This week I am highlighting one of the tools I will be presenting during my MLK day presentation.  Flipgrid was introduced to me through twitter a few months ago.  Teachers can create a grid of questions and students respond with a short video response (90 seconds).  The teacher can then moderate these videos or automatically post them to their grid where anyone with the grid password can view them.

The  Flipgrid admin page is designed to be very user friendly.  You can moderate and password protect each grid of questions you create.  There are no student accounts needed to use this site which allows them to focus on their response not their user info.  You can request a 21 day trial of  Flipgrid and then it offers a very reasonable yearly subscription fee.  

I can see teachers using this powerful site in many different ways:

• Responding to questions about a book

• Sharing data from a lab experiment

• Explaining how to solve a math problem

• Sharing different viewpoints on historical events

• Recording a phrase or discussion in World Language class

This tool would work best for grades 7-12, but could be used for other grades with parent permission.  Please leave a comment on how you are already using  Flipgrid or how you plan to use it.