Newsela and lesson features of Nearpod.
If you are familiar with these tools follow this link for more information about the partnership.
A quick introduction of these two tools if you are unfamiliar with them (taken from https://www.commonsense.org/education/)
Newsela is an online news-as-literacy platform (and Chrome app) that features current, high-interest articles on everything from current events to myths and legends and from literature to science. Content is updated daily, with stories from a wide range of sources (from the Associated Press to Scientific American to the Washington Post) in both English and Spanish. On top of this, all articles are Common Core-aligned and available in five Lexile levels, ranging (roughly) from third to 12th grade. Each leveled text features a quiz tailored to that particular article plus a writing prompt that asks students to write and respond to what they’ve read — some articles also include vocabulary words.
Newsela’s resources are free to students; all the site’s articles and quizzes, as well as the annotation tool, are available for open online use. For teachers, the paid Pro subscription offers the site’s most useful options. These include a dashboard to manage students’ assignments and view both individual and class results, tracking progress toward meeting the related Common Core State Standards. Additionally, the Pro subscription, tuned to the needs of schools and districts, adds greater transparency, tracking, and customization.
Nearpod is the go-to tool for interactive presentations and assessments. Teachers use the site to create original multimedia presentations or draw from an extensive, growing library of pre-made offerings (many CCSS-aligned and some at a cost). Teachers can upload videos, images, audio clips, and PDF files as well as embed multiple-choice quizzes and polls. Draw Its (students write directly on a slide), collaboration boards, and open-ended questions provide plenty of variety to liven up presentations. Teachers launch the presentation and monitor progress either from the website or through the app. Using the Nearpod app on their devices, students input a code and their names to access content and submit responses.
With Nearpod, teachers interact with students and view student responses in real time, enabling students to take ownership of their learning rather than passively viewing a teacher-directed whole-class presentation. Teachers can control the timing or launch homework sessions in which students move through at their own pace. Either way, it’s easy to see who is and who isn’t viewing the presentation, which helps with classroom management and reinforces appropriate use of technology in the classroom. To account for downtime when waiting for peers to finish responding, it might be a good idea to encourage students to take notes for later review.
