Posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2014 by Will Hagle
Newsela is a news site designed to build nonfiction literacy amongst its readers.
Newsela is a news site that publishes each of its articles at five different reading levels. 
The site was built with educators in mind, allowing teachers to offer instruction to all students regardless of their level of reading comprehension. Newsela also helps expand students nonfiction literacy, offering quizzes and the ability to track individual progress. The site’s content is split into eight categories: War & Peace, Science, Kids, Money, Law, Health, Arts and Sports. Some of the articles are focused on current events, other offer a more historical analysis of world events. If you’re a teacher, you’re bound to find content that’s relative to your classroom subject matter on Newsela.
The free version of Newsela is useful for teachers, making it easy to access the ad-free site and to assign specific articles to classes.
If teachers want additional features — such as the ability to view individual and classroom-wide results, add annotations to articles and a variety of other features — they’ll have to pay for Newsela Pro. The subscription price for Newsela Pro varies based upon a variety of factors. The free version is still fun to play around with. It’s interesting to see how Newsela adjusts the wording of its articles based on the reading level selected, and it’s obvious that the site has an effective method of improving literacy.
