#5 - News-O-Matic
Kids are curious about the world around them. They see the news and don't always understand what's going on. News-O-Matic is a device agnostic daily digital newspaper designed just for kids! Everyday News-O-Matic offers 5 news articles about what is happening in the world. The articles are engaging, exciting, and most importantly geared towards younger students.
Each article contains many different engaging extras:
My students loved the "read to me" option. I also loved this as it makes the text accessible to anyone. It is also read in a real sounding fluent voice - not robotic. My students also loved to look at the slide shows, the videos, and they loved the draw it feature where they could draw how they felt about the article.
I loved the questions feature - I always instructed my students to read or listen to the article, complete the questions, then do the "extras". The common core standards focus a lot on informational text. I got a lot of information about my students comprehension skills of informational text through News-O-Matic's questions feature.
As a teacher, I was able to create accounts for my students. I was even able to assign lexile levels to individual students to make sure the content was accessible. The teacher dashboard looks like this:
I loved the ability to see my student's scores and to look at their individual answers to see where their strengths and struggles are. This is excellent formative assessment.
News-O-Matic also includes fun learning activities for students in their Newsroom and Games sections:
Another thing I love about News-O-Matic is they are not afraid to tackle the tough issues that are happening around the world. At first, I was nervous about this, however I now know that News-O-Matic has a child psychologist on staff who makes sure the articles are appropriate for children.
My students read News-O-Matic everyday. Whether it was during centers, when they finished their work, literacy choice time, or even indoor recess. Students would get REALLY excited when an article would come up that was related to content we were currently learning in class! I loved to see them making these connections.
News-O-Matic sends out a teacher edition of the newspaper the night before so that as a teacher I can see at a glance the articles and the lexile levels that will be new the next day:
A year ago I completed and action research project on using technology to improve informational text comprehension. News-O-Matic was one of the tools I used (as was PebbleGo). Check out the results here:
For more information visit:
Happy Newspaper Reading!!!
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