Newsela Rolls out Back-to-School Updates with Interactive Video, Time-Saving Knowledge Pages, and New Novel Studies

News provided by

Aug 23, 2022, 08:00 ET

NEW YORK, Aug. 23, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading K-12 instructional content platform Newsela kicked off back-to-school with one of its biggest product updates since it launched in 2013 providing teachers with daily news articles available at five reading levels. Enhancements span Newsela's suite of paid solutions—Newsela ELA, Newsela Social Studies, Newsela Science, and Newsela SEL—and provide teachers with more types of content to engage students, more curations to support teaching best practices and requirements, and more intuitive ways to quickly find what they need on the platform.

"It's not just full backpacks and empty notebooks making their way into classrooms this fall–Newsela is bringing dynamic new content and time-saving tools to teachers and administrators across the country," said Matthew Gross, founder and CEO of Newsela. "This school year, we focused on getting best-in-class content into the hands of teachers, the moment they need it. We added hundreds of interactive, accessible videos and paired them with up-to-date, standards-aligned texts and activities for a curated experience that powers teaching and drives student engagement and learning."

What's new with our content? Hundreds of new pieces of multimedia content that will bring relevance to classroom lessons and remove the guesswork of finding standards-aligned content for teachers.

An additional 900+ engaging, accessible, and standards-aligned interactive videos across social studies, ELA, and science videos that will save teachers hours of time spent searching through unvetted videos on the web. All videos have embedded quizzes and searchable transcripts so teachers can create high-quality lessons that are more engaging and more accessible for a variety of learners. Plus, social studies curations that pair videos with leveled, text-based primary and secondary sources to help all students access grade-level concepts, regardless of their literacy skills.
State-based social studies collections that align with state-specific standards. These premium curations of hard-to-find content are designed to help teachers meet individual state requirements – from teaching the Massachusetts Constitution to the Geography of North Carolina, and beyond.
New and enhanced C3 Teachers Inquiries on civics, the Holocaust, and genocide studies, providing teachers with a standards-aligned, inquiry-based approach to enable student-led exploration and comply with state requirements.
Updated novel studies collections that provide engaging texts and build background knowledge for now nearly 200 books being read in class, including The Pearl by John Steinbeck and Dominicana by Angie Cruz.
New debate and discussion curations that challenge students to improve media literacy skills, think critically, and create evidence-based arguments. A new special collection provides texts with embedded bias and reliability ratings to help students evaluate what they are reading.
Twice as many relevant topics to support student research projects on everything from women in history to the future of virtual reality to help students build research and presentation skills.
Updated course-area collections that infuse present-day connections to history, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine curated into Newsela's U.S. History collection on the Cold War.
A revamped & refreshed Newsela SEL Collection with 135+ new lessons, available in English and Spanish by the end of the year. The new SEL collection spans elementary, middle and high school and includes poetry and fiction resources to integrate into SEL instruction.

What's new on the platform? Time-saving tools that ease the burden on educators, make it even easier to create comprehensive, engaging lessons for students, and easily access school-wide and classroom data on usage and performance.

Brand new knowledge pages that will serve as a home for vetted, classroom-ready, and instructionalized content on often-taught people, places, topics, events, and even standards. Knowledge pages are multi-modal curations of Newsela's 15,000+ pieces of content and will surface all the content related to any one topic into one place. Available in September.
A personalized and updated homepage that surfaces the content teachers need, when they need it. The homepage will now be personalized to the grade levels and subjects teachers teach. Available in September.
Search updates that provide intuitive filters built specifically for the classroom so that teachers will be able to search by article, text set, videos, and even standards.
Substantial conformance to the latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 standards, making the platform more accessible to students, regardless of their ability or use of assistive technology. Newsela updated its Read Aloud features for articles, keyboard navigation, and screen readers. All videos now have closed captions, a transcript, audio descriptions, and a 4-question comprehension quiz.
A Google Classroom add-on that will save teachers time on planning, grading, and record keeping by streamlining the disparate edtech tools teachers are juggling. Teachers can now search for Newsela content and view and grade student work directly in Google Classroom.

Check out more about what Newsela has to offer in the 2022-23 school year at our website, newsela.com.

About Newsela

Newsela takes authentic, real world content from trusted sources and makes it instruction ready for K-12 classrooms. Each text is published at five reading levels, so content is accessible to every learner. Today, over 3.3 million teachers and 40 million students have registered with Newsela for content that's personalized to student interests, accessible to everyone, aligned to instructional standards, and attached to activities and reporting that hold teachers accountable for instruction and students accountable for their work. With over 15,000+ texts on our platform and 10 new texts published every day across 20+ genres, Newsela enables educators to go deep on any subject they choose.

For more information about Newsela or to join the team, visit newsela.com.

Press Contact: Hilary Lyons, [email protected], (917) 267-2436

SOURCE Newsela