Newsela – beyond reading levels

For educators wanting an alternative to textbook-focused instruction or quality compliments to textbook-focused instruction using historical documents and quality news stories, Newsela may provide just what you are looking for. In addition to the carefully curated content, the education service offers assessment tools and perhaps of greatest interest to many educators, the same content offered at multiple reading levels.

This recent Fordham Institute educational web site offers this description of Newsela. If you have heard of Newsela and perhaps even created a free account, you may wonder about the cost of the features provided with paid access. Newsela does not post these costs, but the Fordham article provides the following information.

“Newsela’s fee-based version, Newsela PRO, offers enhanced tools and experiences. Newsela does not publish prices on its website but shared in a recent tweet that the Pro version costsabout $6,000 per school, $2,000 per grade level, and $18 per student per year. (Newsela has worked with DonorsChoose in the past, so that may be an option for teachers who wish to subscribe to Newsela PRO on their own. They can also request a free thirty-day trial to see whether Newsela PRO works well for their purposes). (quoted content from Fordham article).”

Among the capabilities of Newsela that I find most intriguing are the “layering” capabilities provided. Layering is my way of describing annotation features (highlighting, annotation, and the embedding of prompts and questions) that I believe allow students to apply study strategies and perhaps more uniquely allow educators to demonstrate and teach study strategies.

Educators can explore the basic features of Newsela by establishing a free account. This should allow enough experience to determine whether a paid account is worthwhile.