Get teched: Newsela’s new app puts education in your pocket

This week,

, the edtech company that leverages daily news to help students build their reading comprehension skills, launched an app for iOS devices. As Newsela services students from grades 2-12, and younger generations are more connected than ever, the media startup’s app extension makes sense.

As a platform, Newsela aggregates daily news articles from top national and regional publications such as the Washington Post and Associated Press and allows students to read them across five different reading levels. Catering to students’ individual learning capabilities, the company encourages readers to engage with news at a specialized reading level and empowers students to change reading levels as they see fit.

Within Newsela’s intuitive app, the learning experience is mobilized. Students can set their reading level, and then browse and search the platform’s library of articles. Readers are prompted to join a teacher’s class through the app, read assigned articles and take quizzes to test their comprehension. Teachers, parents and education administrators can also view all assignments in the app.

 

When a student takes quizzes on articles not assigned by a teacher they appear in a separate “independent work” tab. The quizzes help students to assess their reading development and proficiency within Common Core standards.

As students hone their reading skills, they can adjust the reading level of their articles with a simple two-finger swipe.

Currently, more than 650,000 teachers have assigned over 100 million Newsela articles to their students and the resource is used by more than 70 percent of all U.S. public schools.