top of page

“NEWSELA” – An Amazing Tool for Literacy Studies

NEWSELA” – An Amazing Differentiated Instruction Strategy Tool for Literacy Studies.

 

Purpose:

 

Newsela was founded by Matthew Gross in 2013. CNN article on Matthew Gross reports that it was when he was working on this project in New York when Gross came to realize that (1) classrooms of today must be able to adapt to the differing literacy levels of students and (2) technology of today is capable of supporting this need for flexibility. The article also mentions that Gross launched Newsela despite his misgivings about starting a start-up company in the field of education technology, because he also had a personal reason that he was invested in seeing this technology work and introduced in classrooms. This push came from his middle son, Curtis, who was struggling with reading – Level 2 out of Level 4. Gross was disheartened to find his son’s teachers seeming to have given up on Curtis’ possibility to learn. In addition, Gross confirmed his theory that the materials used in the classrooms did not offer flexibility to meet the needs of readers at various literacy levels. This experience gave Gross the conviction that he needed to get the venture going. In a word, the purpose of Newsela is to provide quality real-world news articles of diverse topic ranges from credible sources (so that students may choose a topic that interests them) and meet the literacy and comprehension level of each individual student at their particular literacy & comprehension levels.

​

Sources:

CNN article on Matthew Gross written by Shannoon Gupta, published on June 28, 2018.

Business Insider article on Newsela written by Chris Weller, published on September 14, 2016

 

The coolest feature of Newsela is its language level conversion program. When teachers or students choose an article, Newsela shows the language level of the original text and teachers or students themselves can then choose at what language level they would like to read the article, because the Newsela’s language level conversion program changes the vocabularies and sentence syntaxes from one literacy level to another with one click! How cool is this!!

​

This is how it works:

​

What is a polar vortex?”

​

[Original article’s text Level = 7;

Word Count = 843 words]

​

polar.png

*It might not be possible to access these links unless you sign up for Newsela. It is free to sign up.

bottom of page