NEWSELA.. a little update... Look What I Discovered!

Hello friends!  I hope everyone enjoyed that little extra time off yesterday.  I stayed home in my jammies all day long.  I did a little laundry, watched a Harry Potter marathon, and worked on a little school work.
While I was in school mode and cruising through NEWSELA to find a fun article to assign my smarties for the week, I stumbled upon the highlighting feature.  First, if you don't know about Newsela you can go {HERE} and read my blog post about it.  Second... seriously.. those of you that use Newsela, did you know you can highlight?  I love this site.  I really do.  But honestly, I was worried about my struggling students who need to practice the close reading pretty much daily.  Reading on the computer was not going to do it for me.  Even with my higher students I was worried about them breezing through the article with little accountability.  But I discovered that you have the ability to highlight text on Newsela and the teacher (ME) can go back into the binder, select a student and SEE what was highlighted.  HELLO!! The accountability rating just got a few notches higher.  My friends, it is so simple too!
WOW! The possibilities for using this site exploded for me!  For example, do you teach your students about writing solid paragraphs?  How about having them choose part of an article and highlighting the main idea, details and conclusions in different colors?  If you look through the articles you can find argument style writing.  Students could highlight the arguments in different colors.  Teaching text structure?  BAM! Highlight cause/effect, compare/contrast... my mind is spinning.  Want to know what else is AWESOME?  Paperless... as in no accumulation of paper sitting on my desk for me to grade... I can see who has mastery and who's not there yet, right from my iPad and use that data quickly to see who needs more teacher group work.
LOVE IT!

Do you use Newsela?  Do you have any tricks that you've learned?  Please share them, and I will continue to post about anything that I find!
After All This Time...... ALWAYS!  Carry on my friends.

5 comments

  1. I did not know this! Thanks for sharing!!

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  2. I still need to check out NewsELA...thank you for the reminder. I am putting it on my Wunderlist!
    Alison
    Rockin' and Lovin' Learnin'

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  3. I keep seeing this site everywhere! I've got to get my act together and get on it!

    Rissa
    Keep Calm and Hoot On

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  4. Love this find! I'm planning on introducing NewsELA next week to my class-thanks for the tip! Keep them coming Michele! :) (no pressure)
    Joanne
    Head Over Heels For Teaching

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  5. This is wonderful. Thanks for sharing.

    Kristin
    www.thereadbox.blogspot.com

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