Newsela's 'Biggest Update' Yet to Paid Solutions Includes Interactive Video, Knowledge Pages, and Novel Studies

• By Kristal Kuykendall
• 08/29/22

Instructional content platform Newsela has unveiled its “biggest updates” since its 2013 launch, with enhancements on each of the company’s paid solutions, Newsela ELA, Newsela Social Studies, Newsela Science, and Newsela SEL, according to a news release.

The updates aim to “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,” the company said.

“This school year, we focused on getting best-in-class content into the hands of teachers, the moment they need it,” said Newsela founder and CEO Matthew Gross. “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.”

New Instructional Content

Following is a summary list of the new instructional content launched for Fall 2022:

• An additional 900-plus accessible and standards-aligned interactive videos across social studies, ELA, and science intended to save teachers time searching through unvetted videos on the web. All videos have embedded quizzes and searchable transcripts.
• 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 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 over 135 new lessons, available in English and Spanish, coming 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.

New Educator Resources

Following is a summary list of the new educator resources for Fall 2022:

• Brand new knowledge pages that will serve as a home for vetted, classroom-ready instructional content on often-taught people, places, topics, events, and even standards. Knowledge pages are multi-modal curations of Newsela's 15,000-plus pieces of content and will surface all the content related to any one topic into one place. (Coming 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. (Coming 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, including updated 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.

Learn more at Newsela.com.