In this video series about how to teach remotely, I'm gonna be sharing different
ideas and strategies for how to use free education technology programs to teach
your students online. In this video, I'm gonna show you everything you need to
know about how to use one of my favorite programs, Newsela. Newsela normally
costs money but because of the current situation with school closures, they've
made their product free for educators until the end of the school year.
Newsela is probably the best resource for pulling together highly engaging
articles about just about any topic you can imagine. Newsela updates their
website on a daily basis so students can access articles about relevant current
events alongside articles about different academic topics. But what makes
Newsela really stand out is the fact that each article is available at
multiple Lexile levels. Having access to the same article at different Lexile
levels will allow you to give students articles at their just right reading
level. In this video, I'm going to show you several different strategies for how
you can use this amazing resource for remote teaching. My name is Sam Kary and
this is my YouTube channel for the New EdTech Classroom. If you find the tips
that I share in this video helpful, please share with other teachers that
you know, hit the like button and subscribe to my channel, and hit the
notification bell to make sure you don't miss any of my weekly video updates. I've
been using Newsela in my own class for years. The fact that it is now free for
all educators to use until the end of this school year is definitely an
opportunity that you shouldn't pass up. So let's jump in and see what Newsela is
all about. In order to access your free account, click 'Get Free Access'. Click on
the 'Get Instant Access' button, login with an email. It's going to ask you whether
or not you have a previous Newsela account. If you don't, click 'No' and then
'Get Started', choose 'I'm an Educator', select 'Yes' for being a faculty member of
a K-12 school, and then choose your role. Enter the name of your school and the
city where it's located, and then you should be logged into your account.
If you have a Google Classroom, by far the best way to create a Newsela account
for them is to go up to the 'Classes' tab and then click 'Sync with Google'. There
you'll see a menu with your different Google Classrooms. Select the classroom
that you want to bring in, choose the grade and subject, and then click 'Sync
Selected Classes'. Once your class is synced, you'll see it show up below and
when you click on students you'll see the students that are registered for
your Google Classroom show up in your Newsela account. Now all students will
need to do is log in with their email and they'll be able to access their
personalized Newsela account. If you don't have a Google
Classroom, you can also add students by going up to 'Create a Class' give the
class a name, a subject, and a grade level, click 'Create Class' and in order to add
students, go to 'More' and then select 'Add Students'. Here you'll be provided a link
you can give to your students in order to get them into Newsela
or you could share with them the class code. So let's take a look at the
different content that Newsela offers. You'll see at the top there are
different tabs for different subjects as well as a search tab where you could
just search for any topic that you are interested in finding an article about.
Once you've entered your search term you'll see that a bunch of articles show
up about that topic in addition to individual articles. You'll see that
there are also text sets. A text set contains multiple articles about that
particular topic and one of the great things about Newsela is that many text
sets have already been pre-created and some have already even been put together
as an assignment by other teachers. So let's say that I want to check out this
article about elephants. I can click on it and you'll see at the top that
there's an option to change the Lexile level of this particular article. So
notice how if I have it at an 8/10 Lexile level, the grade level equivalency
for this article is approximately grade 5, whereas if I drop the Lexile level
down to a 400, the article is going to be more appropriate for a second grade
reading level. The content of the articles is mostly the same, it's just
that the complexity of the language has been changed
to make it more readable for different levels of readers. Now once you've
actually set up Newsela with your students, it's going to actually learn their
individual reading levels and you're really not going to have to bother
yourself with changing the Lexile level of the different articles. We'll take a
look at how that works later. So let's say that I want to take this article and
create an assignment for my students. I'll select 'Create Assignment' and there
you'll see that I'm given a drop-down menu where I can choose the particular
class that I want to assign this article to. You'll notice on text level it says
'Adjust Level'. Again, the article is actually going to auto adjust based on
my students' reading level after the program learns what that is. And I'm also
able to write specific instructions that I want to give to my students. Usually in
these instructions I'm telling my students to highlight the text and
annotate it in a particular way in order to build a skill. So I might tell them to
highlight words they don't know in red and then highlight any parts of the text
that they have a connection about in yellow. Once I'm ready to create an
assignment, I'll click 'Assign' and there you'll see I have a created article and
I'm also able to view exactly who has read this article as well as whether
they did the different activities that are associated with the article. So let's
go ahead and look at what this would look like on the student end. Once a student
logs in, they're going to see the article that has been assigned to them at the
top of their page. When they select it, the article will be pushed out to them
at their just right reading level and then they can go ahead and read that
article and do the activity that's been assigned to them. In order to highlight,
the student just needs to drag over the word that they want to highlight. If they
were assigned to do an annotation, they could also write a note underneath what
they've highlighted. At the end of the article you'll see that there's a quiz
that's available for students. You'll see there's also an option to practice power
words. Power words are available for some articles but not all. A student can see
their progress on all the articles that have been assigned to them by clicking
on their binder. There they're able to see the average Lexile level of the
articles they've been reading as well as their quiz average and their performance
on all the individual articles that have been assigned to them. I use this binder
to motivate my students to do well on the quizzes by giving them different
goals they need to meet for their personal
Lexile level as well as the number of articles that they read and their
average quiz scores. When students log in to their accounts for the first time
you're going to want to direct them to the Reading Skills Check. The Reading
Skills Check is essentially a diagnostic that's going to help Newsela determine
what level to be pushing the articles out to students. You'll see that these
Reading Skills Checks have eight questions rather than the four that most
of the articles have and that's because it's determining how students perform
with different reading skills that are applied to the articles in the Reading
Skills Check. A clear way to use Newsela for remote teaching is simply as a
resource where students can be learning about the different topics that you
would be studying in class. I teach ancient civilizations, so let's say, for
example, that I want to find a text set about ancient China. Here I can click on
the Text Sets tab and see what text sets have already been created. From there I can
share that entire text set to my Google Classroom and I might not require
students to read every single article in the text set but I'm going to have them
select articles that are interesting to them. One of the ways I've been using
Newsela in my class for a long time is by having students apply different
reading skills to a Newsela article and creating a nonfiction report. I've
created the template for this report in Google Docs. You'll see that this
document shows students the different reading skills that they would be
practicing in their report. So let's take a look at a couple of different
nonfiction reports that my students have created. Students are going to apply
different reading skills to an article such as identifying the main idea,
stating their opinion, identifying vocabulary words that they don't know,
asking questions about the text, and so on. Because this report is already a
digital assignment, it's perfect for remote learning. Another idea is that you
could include a link to a Newsela article in a Flipgrid assignment
that you've created. That link could be the centerpiece of a Flipgrid
assignment. Students could all read about a particular topic and then create
short video responses in a virtual classroom in order to discuss that
article. Newsela would be a perfect choice for this because every student in
your class could be learning about the same content, yet reading the article at
their just right Lexile level. I hope you've learned what an amazing resource
Newsela can be for remote teaching. It's going to allow you to provide students
with engaging relevant content at their just right reading level and you can
embed Newsela articles into a variety of virtual learning assignments. If you have
any questions about how I've used Newsela with my class or how I plan to
use it with remote teaching, please ask in the comments below. Thanks so much for
watching my video to the end. If you found it helpful, I'd appreciate it if
you'd hit the like button, share it with other teachers and subscribe to my
channel, and hit the notification bell to make sure you don't miss any of my
weekly updates. Thanks so much and have a great week!