Newsela, the well-known site providing articles with different levels of reading, has recently announced a major change to the features they are offering to users who are not subscribing to the site.

Here’s an excerpt from their announcement of “Newsela Lite”:

Starting next school year, Newsela Lite will offer four leveled news articles for teachers to choose from at a time. Each article is hand-selected by our editorial team and will be available to teachers for four weeks. Each week one of the four articles will expire and be replaced with another timely piece of news content. When a teacher assigns an article, they will be able to see student actions and quiz results, supporting real-time instructional decision-making and individual communication and collaboration. These instructional supports were previously only available in our premium products.

Newsela Lite is free for any teacher to:

– Access 4 pre-selected news articles, offered at 5 reading levels 
– Select and lock reading levels for students
– See alignment to state standards
– Schedule assignments and set due dates
– Access students’ quiz scores
– Respond to students’ write prompt submissions and annotations

I’m adding this info to The Best Places To Get The “Same” Text Written For Different “Levels.”

I made this discovery today after learning our district has made the unwise decision to not renew its subscription to Brainpop, and began to explore different alternatives for many of our content teachers.  Brainpop is great to use for warm-ups and for reinforcing of concepts that had been previously taught in the classroom.

You can find some of those alternatives at The Best Sites Students Can Use For Independent Practice.