It’s almost time for students and teachers to hit the classrooms again. Get ahead before the first bell rings and stay ahead all year long with Newsela’s 2024 back-to-school product updates for educators.

For Admins: Content Promotion

Have you ever wished you could customize your teachers’ Newsela experience to match your district’s curricular priorities and instructional goals? With content promotion, now you can! Enhance your teachers’ experience by showing preferred curricular-aligned content for the following Newsela products and features:

• Newsela ELA

  • Curriculum Complements

  • Novel and Book Studies

  • Themes and topics

  • Content types

  • Specific reading skills
    

• Newsela Social Studies

  • Curriculum Complements

  • Courses

  • Themes, and topics

  • Content types

• Newsela Science

  • Curriculum Complements

  • Courses

  • Supplemental collections

  • Content types

For Admins: Implementation Guides

Implementation guides clarify how to partner with Newsela and give your teachers the tools to use our products successfully. These in-product guides help you ensure high-impact and successful Newsela implementation and usage. Inside, you’ll find helpful resources that cover topics like:

• Key team members

• Integrations

• Professional learning

• Communications

• Instructional best practices

• Measuring success

• Content promotion

For Admins: Improved Reporting

Enhanced reporting gives you a live look into your students’ ELA skills performance and your teachers’ Newsela adoption and usage:

Check in on students' literacy skills development with the Newsela ELA reading skills report

The reading skills report gives you access to the same data teachers see for their classes and students but at a school or district overview level. This data helps you identify and address skill gaps and provide targeted support for teachers and students based on their needs.

See how teachers are using Newsela with the usage report

With the new usage report, you can see how educators across your school or district use Newsela. You can filter by school, grade, or even teacher during a period to ensure everyone is accessing and using the product regularly. With this information, you can support schools and teachers struggling to reach your desired usage targets.

For Teachers: Improved reporting

We’ve replaced the teacher binder with new, revamped reporting. You can find student and class-wide performance reports across Newsela content. See how these new, updated features work:

Get more insights into student and class-wide performance with refreshed classroom and student data pages

Both classroom and individual student reports include a new top-level overview of your class or individual students reading summary on Newsela. Look at data like the average reading levels, how long they spend on each article, and how many texts they’ve viewed.

Teachers with Newsela ELA can look at how students perform on quizzes for individual reading skills like “what the text says,” or “word meaning and choice.” On the classroom report, see how all students perform in one overview module and how they compare to the Newsela average. Drill the classroom data down further on the student reports to look at an individual’s skills performance. 

Finally, check in on your students’ reading activity and performance across Newsela. On the classroom data report, see stats like each student’s average Lexile level, quiz scores, and write prompt scores. For students, you can see this data and more, like which articles they’ve read and which reading skills those articles cover.

For Teachers: New Scaffolds

Explore new scaffolds and features that support reading comprehension across Newsela’s products:

Encourage close reading with checks for understanding

Teachers now have the option to add four AI-generated checks for understanding throughout informational and news texts. They require students to slow down and ensure they understand what they’ve read before continuing with a text.

Close reading helps students practice language and vocabulary development, focus on key skills, and think critically about what  they’re reading.

For Teachers: Search and Discover Features

Search and discover features for teachers

Find exactly what you need when you need it with global updates to Newsela’s search and discovery features:

Discover and explore content easily with the global navigation toolbar

Our new toolbar makes it easy for you to find exactly what you’re looking for from any page in the Newsela platform. Subject-specific browse pages take you right to the content and activities you need for a specific class. Plus, you can search directly from the content toolbar to find what you need at any moment with fewer clicks.

Find the content you need with expanded search filters

Search for just the information you want and nothing you don’t with our updated search filters. The redesigned search page has a brand new toolbar that lets you filter for resources that fit your exact instructional needs more easily. Filter by:

• Grade level

• Reading level

• Language

• Instructional features

• Reading skills

And more!

For Teachers: New Instructional Content and Interactive Activities

Get even more resources to build background knowledge, include diverse perspectives, and practice literacy skills with more great content and activity offerings across Newsela’s products.

Support your youngest readers with K-2 content 

Newsela ELA, Newsela Social Studies, and Newsela Science now offer age-appropriate informational texts for your youngest readers. Find them by selecting “Texts for K-2 Classrooms from the bottom of the lefthand menu on your ELA, social studies, or science browse page. 

We designed these texts to reflect front-of-class instruction rather than independent reading to give your youngest students a whole class literacy learning experience. These texts don’t include traditional Newsela student activities like quizzes, writing prompts, or Power Words.

In Newsela ELA and Newsela Social Studies, we’ve added content for events like Pride Month, Juneteenth, and the Fourth of July. Stay tuned for continuous seasonal content updates throughout the school year.

Build background knowledge on classics and new favorites with additions to our Novel and Book Studies collection

You asked and we listened! Thanks to customer requests, we’ve added even more novel studies to our Novel and Book Studies collection. Check out these and more of our almost 500 titles to build background knowledge with your students:

• “Two Degrees” by Alan Gratz

• “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline

• “The Parker Inheritance” by Varian Johnson

• “I Will Always Write Back” by Caitlin Alifirenka, Liz Welch, and Martin Ganda

• “Amari and the Night Brothers” by B.B. Alston

Introduce and explore history with the Elementary Social Studies Spotlights collection 

Our new Elementary Spotlights for Newsela Social Studies cover topics upper elementary students love, like holidays, animals, sports, and wacky history. They’re designed to push students to read closely, collaborate, and create. Lesson guides help teachers find resources and suggestions to introduce, explore, and demonstrate knowledge in the classroom.

Make history interactive with our primary source + Formative starter packs 

It’s now even easier and more engaging for Newsela Social Studies users to browse primary sources. Newsela’s curriculum experts created pre-built, vetted, and standards-aligned Formative activities for over 250 primary source texts. Use them to have students practice source analysis skills like contextualization and analyzing bias. 

To access the activities, create or sign in to your Formative account. Then visit the “Teach this article” panel in the primary source you want to teach and click the Formative activity. Your Formative account opens in a new window, allowing you to save the template, customize the activity, or assign it as is.