WAB Learns: Books &amp; Beyond (WAB Lab): Newsela

Getting Started

Teachers and students get unlimited access to more than 20 genres of content at 5 reading levels, standards-aligned reading activities, and real-time insights to support core instruction and differentiation across the curriculum.

Take these steps to begin your Newsela rollout:

Sign-on to Newsela.com with your @wab.edu email using "Clever" or through clever.com/in/wab
Here is a "getting started checklist"
View a virtual Getting Started Workshop to learn more about Newsela

How to sync your classes in Newsela using Clever

Step by Step Guide to Sync your co-teaching Class in Newsela

Staff/student Sign in

If you're having trouble signing into Newsela please make sure you're signing into the right place - you must sign in using the TOP box that says "Sign in with Clever" it will then take you to your email and password you use for O365.

Students:

If you are signed into Newsela through clever.com/in/wab you will automatically see all your assignments in the assignment tab.

If you are NOT signed in through Clever you will have some difficulty - please SIGN OUT and re-sign in again with Clever.

Annotation with Newseala

Taking Action in Science

Have you ever watched a Ted Talk or read an article on Newsela and have been inspired to pursue a passion project or a call to action? As teachers, we tend to love the idea of having our students engage in passion projects but are uncertain of how to fit it into our curriculum, what resources to use, or if it even aligns with our mandated standards! This webinar will not only explore how can teachers can use Newsela to as a tool to spark student action in Science but also illustrate ideas and resources supported by NGSS that can be used directly with students.

Example Text Sets

ELA

Power Words

Leveraging Power Words in Newsela
Power Words are selected from Newsela’s Academic Word List (AWL) of Tier II academic vocabulary words, organized by grade level. Students who master these words will be well prepared to read complex texts across a variety of subjects. This strategy helps students recognize the meaning of Power Words and challenges students to identify the context clues in the article that support the meaning of new vocabulary.

Newsela & Spanish

Reading Skills

Reading Skills Checks

Available under Collection > Reading Skills Checks, these are a good first step in creating an assignment for students. We recommend that educators assign 3 of the articles at any given time, to give them more insight into how students are performing against several reading skills. These articles are only available at one grade level, so we recommend that educators assign the same-grade-level article.

newsela reading skills Newsela provides insights per student on their reading. In addition reading skills are assessed along 8 dimensions:

What the text says
Main idea, key details & summarization
Connecting people, events and ideas
Word meaning and choice
Text Structure
Point of view and purpose
Interpreting multimedia
Arguments and claims

Students can then work on skills that need growth. It's also a good bridge between the MAP testing sessions

Focus on Reading Skills on Newsela in Order to Achieve Mastery
Students analyze data, set goals, and make intentional improvements on the eight anchor reading standards found within Newsela articles.
Success with tracking reading skills using a badge system
Over the course of this school year, I wanted to tighten up the process in which I had students working on reading skills so that, over the course of the school year, they would work on each of the eight reading skills.

Student Tracking

Newsela and SEL

Newsela and Top SEL programs
Weave Social-Emotional Learning Strategies into Core Instruction
Social-Emotional Learning Collection
Suggests articles by theme and school sections

Text Sets

Looking for specific topics:

Search for DNA, then choose Text Sets, like this one by a Newsela Certified Educator: https://newsela.com/text-sets/458929
These are Text Sets created by educators for use in their classrooms; you'll see a lot of inspiration from teachers using inquiry-based methods of exploration. These are gems. Plus, they have additional resources and links.
https://newsela.com/rules/text-sets-by-teachers-6-12

https://newsela.com/rules/text-sets-by-teachers-2-5
Everyday Heroes Text Sets: https://newsela.com/text-sets/5390

So you'll see a lot of recommendations are Text Sets. These are nice places to start because they usually have been pre-curated.

Filtering

As I reminder, from the Search page, you can always use "More Filters" to filter by publication source. Agence France Presse, Al Jazeera, the Guardian are some of those.

Additional professional learning

Newsela Certified Educator is available on the Educator Center: https://learn.newsela.com/newsela-certified-educators.

Teach with Newsela

https://learn.newsela.com/teach-with-newsela

If you type in SEL into the Searchbar in the Educator Center, you'll find a variety of webinars and resources on the Social Emotional Learning Collection.

Assigning Articles or Text Sets

When teachers create Assignments, they can also add additional links to the instructions. This allows you to send your students to other websites.

Collaborating on a Text Set
An individual text set can only be edited by a single user; we don't have a collaborative creation feature at this point. As a workaround, I would recommend the following:
Create a shared document (either in google docs, or even an email thread) where you discuss the articles you think would be best for each resolution.
Come to a consensus about which articles will support each resolution, in the shared document/email chain.
Appoint a single teacher to build each text set, indicating in the description any relevant information about the resolution and supporting articles.

Sharing Text Sets with Colleagues
Text sets are always shareable, and editable, by teachers.
Share the links of the text sets with the rest of the teachers in your school, or direct them to find the text sets in "Text Sets at Your School." The text set will be available to them all to assign to their students. You can use either the "share" icon beneath the text set title or directly link the url. Please note: teachers will be able to make their own copy to edit.
When you share your links with other educators, include a note on why they should assign these text sets as is. You might include more information on how to create an assignment for those teachers who may need some support using this support page.