Newsela launched in 2013 with a bold mission: Meaningful classroom learning for every student. Today, our team constantly strives to deliver powerful solutions that inspire our users.
Two weeks ago, we introduced Luna, your AI-powered teaching assistant. Today, we have some exciting new updates to make this school year easier, more impactful, and more engaging for you and your students.
Luna is now live in Formative! Teachers can now chat directly with Luna to build and edit activities and assessments. Luna will ask follow-up questions to refine the outputs so they’re aligned to your instructional or assessment goals. That means easier prep for bell ringers, quizzes, exams, and more! You can create activities, distribute them, and review real-time insights—all in one platform.
In Newsela, we’ve rolled out a new text leveler (for any web content, not just Newsela articles), powered by Luna. When you log in, you’ll also notice a couple of other exciting new tools we’ve rolled out in the last few weeks: a text translator and editable, exportable graphic organizers.
Let’s walk you through what these latest launches look like in product.
[An easier way to build activities in Formative, with Luna](id-formative)
Teachers love Formative’s real-time insights on student learning and engaging activities. But sometimes, it’s tricky to know where to start. Formative has over 20 activity types, after all!
We’ve built a new way for teachers to build with Formative, streamlining assessment creation and prep time so you can focus on what matters most: Your students.
Today, when you log into Formative, you’ll notice a new astronaut popping up when you create or edit a formative. That’s Luna!
Luna is your in-product AI-powered teaching assistant designed to help you quickly create activities on any topic. You’ll chat directly with Luna, just like you do with other chatbots. But with Luna, you can confidently plan your lessons and assessments knowing you’re using a tool informed by our team’s assessment expertise and learning science. (Not to mention, all the great feedback we hear from teachers like you!)
Whether you’re building exit tickets, warm-ups, checks for understanding, quizzes, or exams, Luna guides you through the process in real time—asking smart follow-up questions and generating ready-to-use content that you can easily distribute right within Formative. Plus, you can ask Luna to bulk-edit settings or items for you!
“I'm so blown away by everything that Luna can do. For the icebreaker activity, it would typically take me about 30 minutes to make. Luna is such a huge timesaver; it took about five minutes. I was just so impressed by how effective it was and how it was able to populate everything so quickly.” – Teaching Assistant, California
Here’s what teachers can expect from Luna in Formative today:
Easily create activities like bell ringers, exit tickets, polls, quizzes, and more.
Luna will seek clarity about goals before generating a formative. Luna already knows your account profile, so responses are tailored to your specific subjects and grade level. Luna will also ask you some questions up front to learn more about your instructional goals and how you’d like to leverage your new teaching assistant.
Teachers can update or modify the generated formative by chatting with Luna (you can still adjust the formative manually, too!). Teachers can request modifications, clarify intent, or simplify outputs, ensuring the content meets their unique needs. Any changes made through Luna are reflected live in the formative and teachers can preview the student view instantly, streamlining iteration.
Build, edit, and review results all in one platform. Luna builds and edits activities that you can save to your library and distribute to students, just like you would with any other formative. And you’ll still see the real-time student responses for in-the-moment support.
And if you’d prefer to build an assessment on your own, Luna is available to support behind the scenes with things like:
Digitizing worksheets from PDFs
Creating standards-aligned questions, hints, and answer choice explanations
Generating activities
“I'm excited about the possibility of drafting a test and then just asking Luna to create a test review for it, and create another version of the test for when somebody needs to retake it. Not having to go find all those problems all over again and do it multiple times is so exciting.” – Math Teacher, Florida
Get more from Newsela, with new tools powered by Luna
This school year, you’ll see Luna powering many of the features you know and love—like checks for understanding, Tier III vocabulary definitions, and guided highlighting. You’ll also notice some exciting new updates to Newsela’s subject products where Luna plays a big role.
[Use Newsela’s new text leveler to support differentiation](id-leveler)
Newsela started with the goal of making non-fiction content accessible to students of all grades and ability levels. One of the ways we did this was by making engaging news articles available at five reading levels to make it easier for educators to find grade-level content. Over the years, we built out our content library to include much more than news. You’ll find poems, primary sources, short stories, informational texts, videos, and lots of other content across our repository of 18,000+ vetted, authentic, relevant texts.
The goal has always been the same: Engage students through reading and help them grow.
Leveled texts have become a hot-button topic in conversations about the science of reading. At Newsela, our learning science team actively participates in those conversations, stays up to date on the latest research, and helps shape our products to ensure we’re building solutions that will drive students’ reading growth.
Learning science research shows that students need to access texts at the appropriate complexity level for the task at hand. Sometimes, that means giving them an article at their reading level. In other scenarios, that means challenging them to read a grade-level text, with or without scaffolds.
And while we like to think our curated texts provide you with the content you need to build engaging lessons, we know teachers are the ultimate curators of students’ learning experience. You might want to pull in another favorite text from the web to round out your lesson.
Starting today, you can now use Luna to level text…from anywhere. That means you can supplement your Newsela lesson plans with other content to support your students’ learning, and still ensure that every text you provide students is at an appropriate level of difficulty for the grade you're teaching.
This school year, Luna helps you provide paragraph-by-paragraph translations in over 40 languages. Plus, you’ll still find our whole-article, human-reviewed Spanish translations available for many of our texts.
ELLs need to be able to access and understand grade-level content, using scaffolds to help get them there. With the text translator tool, students can translate a paragraph of a Newsela article into their preferred language, allowing them to embrace their linguistic identities and use that language as a bridge to English acquisition and content learning. What’s more, students can read the same article as their peers, without even having to copy and paste text into a separate translator window.
[Generate customized, editable graphic organizers for any Newsela article](id-go)
Found the perfect Newsela article for your lesson and want to do more with it? You can now generate pre-populated graphic organizers from any text across our subject products. Plus, you can edit the content, assign it, or download and print!
You can use these graphic organizers in a variety of ways—when you’re trying to activate background knowledge at the beginning of a lesson, support vocabulary development, or practice analyzing the main idea of a text.
When you’re viewing the assignment builder of an article, just click “Generate graphic organizer,” and you’ll be able to select from a library of templates, including:
Our team is excited to see what you and Luna can do together this school year. And we bet other teachers would love to learn from you, too. Share your favorite Luna prompts or tips with our community.
One platform for everything you need to instruct, assess, and adjust in real time
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