Effective Literacy Website Review: DOGO News

For teachers and parents wanting to keep young minds interested and informed about current events, DOGO News delivers news specially geared towards audiences of 8+ years old. With engagement and learning in mind, their content also provides an informational experience that is interactive, flourished with attractive media, and aligned with Common Core ELA, Social Studies, and Science.

Upon landing on the homepage at https://www.dogonews.com, users will find news articles to browse and can filter through them by grade level, subject, or type. Categories include Science, Social Studies, World, Environment, Sports, Fun, and even Video for those who want to make sure that their articles are accompanied by additional visuals.

While students can readily explore articles by typing in its URL, teachers can also sign up for a free account that will enable them set-up a class and provide assignments for students. To connect students to a class, students with accounts can use a provided class code or be manually added by the teacher. The teacher can then select an article to assign, and provide it with an assignment title and instructions. Assigned articles will have a comment section that only the class can see in which students can respond to the teacher’s instructions or simply leave their thoughts to share with the class.

Conveniently, DOGO News provides its articles with read-to-me audio and a list of vocabulary words at the bottom of each one. These terms are clickable and will lead users to their definitions in case they are unknown. Students can even complete a word search puzzle based on the terms by clicking the Play Game option. If teachers are interested in additional features such as comprehension questions and critical thinking challenges on the articles to provide for their students, a PRO version of the website is available.

With DOGO News, keeping up with current events is made more fun and student-friendly. Providing the ability to find content that is interesting, easy to understand, and accompanied by media and various interactive features, the website is a wonderful news source that both teachers and students can appreciate.

Effective Literacy Website: StoryJumper

StoryJumper, which can be accessed at https://www.storyjumper.com, is a website that helps bring out the inner author in anyone. It is a free online book creator and publisher that offers clever tools for writing and illustrating stories. Parents and teachers will find it useful for sharing stories and presenting information, while students will find an encouraging means for reading and writing themselves.

Conveniently for 4th and 5th grade teachers, StoryJumper provides a sample lesson plan supported by common core standards with downloadable resources to go along. However, StoryJumper is for everyone! The interface, tools, and endless ideas make it easy to be utilized by parents, teachers, students of all grade levels, and in every school subject. Students can write narratives or reflection journals, demonstrate their understanding of a skill by teaching it through pages, introduce themselves with an all about me style, co-author by collaborating with classmates, and more! For younger kids, safety may be of concern, but all of this can be done with the highest level of information and identity protection as assured by StoryJumper. 

When creating a book, users can select a template or simply start from scratch. Afterwards, they will be taken to the editor where they can explore and create away. In the editor, there are options to add text, upload photos, and insert audio recordings. StoryJumper also offers a ready set of images, props, and scenes that can be filtered through. The editor uses a drag-and-drop style with further editing options that makes it so user friendly, but for those who are interested, StoryJumper offers a how-to video to help get started. In the end, completed books can be professionally published and ordered. Although creating a book requires computer access, users are free to read StoryJumper books on any device.

All in all, StoryJumper is a great website for promoting reading and writing that is safe for children. Students can read ready-made books or get creative with one of their own through an easy and intuitive experience. All that is needed is an idea to get started.

Effective Literacy Website Review: NoRedInk

NoRedInk (https://www.noredink.com) is a web-based program designed to help students improve their grammar and writing skills. CEO and founder, Jeff Scheur, decided to launch the program after eight years of grading over 15,000 papers as an English teacher. He is joined along by a team of advocates, designers, engineers, and even more educators to work towards their mission of building better writers. The program offers a great deal of their standards-based content for free, but premium accounts are also available.

For teachers interested in utilizing NoRedInk, the website does a fair job introducing its new users with a guide-through that includes a brief welcome video and an interactive demo set up to start off with. After setting up a class, teachers can assign work, review student data, or look into the curriculum library through their dashboard. To name a few, identifying adjectives, capitalization, inserting commas, and subject-verb agreement are a few skills that can be found in the library.

On a free account, teachers can choose between three activities to assign: diagnostic, practice, or quiz. The diagnostics help gauge student understanding at the beginning of a unit or semester. The practices are made up of adaptive exercises that are mastery-based and guide students through scope-and-sequence. Quizzes are designed as summative assessments to evaluate understanding at the end of a unit.

Targeting engagement, NoRedInk provides interactive lessons consisting of friendly visuals, guided instruction, and tips prior to the start of a practice. Additionally, NoRedInk combines student interest with learning by including pop-culture and other relatable content to personalize the experience.

If teachers are looking for an additional resource for grammar and writing, NoRedInk may be worth the look. It is a website designed for teachers by teachers with student improvement in mind. With NoRedInk, students can practice grammar, usage, mechanics, and other writing skills through adaptive and personalized exercises. When it comes to tracking student progress, teachers will also appreciate the automatic grading and reports that can provide valuable information in further driving teacher instruction.

Effective Literacy Website Review: Epic!

Epic! is a digital library founded in January 2013 by Suren Markosien and Kevin Donahue. It made its breakthrough when its founders realized how much children who loved their tablets were easily reaching out for their devices to play games or watch videos when they could be spending much of that time reading. With the support of top investors and veterans from the children’s publishing industry, the talented team built the digital library to provide children specially in K-5 with a reading experience that would live up to its Epic! name.

Upon landing on the website on https://www.getepic.com, you will find that it offers a free 30 day trial to access 25,000 books, learning videos, quizzes, and more for a monthly payment of $7.99 per month. For educators and librarians however, the website is kept exclusively and completely free thanks to family subscriptions. With a verified educator/librarian account, the website will guide you to an interactive and brief tour where you can earn yourself an Epic! certified teacher award just for completing it. It is fairly easy and helps familiarize users with its navigation for a smoother exploration.

While teachers can personalize account settings to easily find relative books and topics for class lessons, they can also create individual student accounts to provide them with the same effect. When students access their individual accounts, the website will take note of their age, favorite subjects, and interests to start them off with recommended reads. The website’s recommendations will also adjust based on students’ reading selections. These are neat features to support students with pleasure reading, which plays a key factor in their exposure to any kind of reading and their overall literacy experience. If recommended reads do not draw in its user, a search engine is provided so that students can search for a book by its author, title, or keyword.

As previously mentioned, Epic! offers videos and quizzes. Videos range from how-to projects to informational learning videos that nicely complement the website’s library of books. Quizzes are sorted by topic so that students can choose what to test their knowledge on. They will immediately be provided with feedback as the quiz progresses. Additionally, teachers have the option to create a quiz to reflect understanding of a specific text.

As for the actual reading experience, it is let alone given outstandingly. For one thing, the website delivers on graphics. The books are displayed with their front covers exposed, illustrations are included within, and their pages even flip to represent that real-book feeling. There are also a number of audiobooks for a “read to me option,” in which text can be further magnified or underlined as they are read aloud. Each word of every book is clickable so that students can instantly view definitions of unfamiliar words. Book topics range from history, adventure, daily life, fantasy, mystery and more.

To further support student engagement, rewards that come in the form of achievement badges can be unlocked all around. To earn them, students would just need to explore the website and of course, build up their reading time. They are also free to favorite books and create different collections.

Everything about Epic! is beautiful and offers a lot of beneficial features to support reading with high hopes of engagement and learning. The website is made easy to navigate for students and is simply fun to explore. Although home access is not available for free, the overall literacy experience that teachers can provide under an educator account is worthwhile and may even carry on to the home environment.

Effective Literacy Website Review: Read Theory

In a dynamic classroom filled with a diverse group of learners, it may sometimes be challenging to find material, let alone time, to regularly provide and assess students with personalized reading material. With Read Theory, an educational program that can be accessed at https://readtheory.org, teachers can provide reading activities for students of varying ages and levels of ability. The online program is completely free of charge and provides reports to go along its reading activities. For the busy teacher looking for additional and individualized literacy resources, Read Theory is a website worth exploring.

Once teachers have set up a class on Read Theory, students can log on to their accounts where there will be first met with an initial assessment to determine the level of their upcoming reading activities. These reading activities provide students with passages and comprehension questions whose content is in line with the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards. Depending on how students do on each of these reading quizzes, their reading level may alter and so will the level of their upcoming quizzes. Knowledge points and achievement badges, which act as a gaming feature and contribute to a motivational experience, can be earned when students reach achievements in their reading activities. 

Another neat feature to Read Theory is its writing option. When teachers select this option, students are additionally given writing prompts based on the passages they have read. Completed written responses show up on the teacher dashboard where they can review the writing, score it, and send student feedback.

Altogether, Read Theory makes a great resource for the diverse classroom. It adapts to student performance, is in line with the ELA CCSS, and is helpful in providing valuable information on Lexile and grade level progression. The writing activities also make for a wonderful bonus to its overall literacy support!

Effective Literacy Website Review: Quizlet

For learners of varying ages, studying vocabulary has often been paired up with creating flashcards. At Quizlet, these flashcards are made possible without the need for bringing out those good ol’ index cards. Quizlet is an online study application that uses the idea of flashcards to serve its purpose – that is, to help students and their teachers practice and master whatever it is they are learning. The website can be found on https://quizlet.com. 

Aside from the flashcard-style training, Quizlet provides a good measure of practice through other interactive activities and games that make studying more enjoyable. While the website can be utilized for any subject matter, it makes it contributions significantly towards literacy for its effectiveness in learning vocabulary as well as spelling.

Upon creating an account, users can begin creating study sets by filling out lists of terms and definitions. There is also an option to include a Quizlet-suggested photo to go along with each term. (Inserting a non-suggested Quizlet photo would require an account upgrade.) With a completed study set, the user can choose to study the terms in 5 different study modes and 3 different game modes. 

The study modes include: Learn, which marks repeatedly incorrect answers and tracks progress of mastery; Flashcards, the original study mode in which users flip cards to view definitions; Write, in which the definition is provided and the user must correctly type in the term; Spell, in which the user must correctly type in the term that matches the definition that is presented audibly; and Test, which can be customized by question type such as matching, true/false, and multiple choice. Not to mention, the flashcards can be presented audibly and the customizable tests can be printed out.

Game modes include: Match, in which users put together a term with its definition as quickly as they can; Gravity, a game that utilizes spelling and vocabulary; and Live, which must be set up by the teacher so that students can play together. 

“Quizlet Teacher,” a paid version of the website especially for teachers is also offered. Features such as data tracking, ad removal, and further customizations come along the upgrade. For teachers and students who are interested in Quizlet, but do not have an account, having the link to any study set will provide non-account holders with all the study modes offered as well as the Match and Gravity games. All you have to do is search from their library of over 200 million study sets! This makes sharing with students an ease. 

If teachers are looking for a way to improve student achievement in vocabulary and spelling, Quizlet is worth a try. Other literacy related topics/skills that can be utilized with Quizlet include inferencing, context clues, language skills, and more. Depending on how the study sets are written and structured, the possibilities are quite endless. 

Effective Literacy Website Review: ReadWorks

When it comes to finding reading material for student practice and assessments, one can look into what ReadWorks (https://www.readworks.org) has to offer. The website and company stems from a commitment to support reading comprehension and the student achievement gap therein. In ReadWorks, teachers have access to a research-based curriculum to include a library of reading selections and lesson plans geared towards students in K-12. 

The library that ReadWorks provides include nonfiction and literary articles that are standards aligned and can be filtered by grade level, Lexile, subject matter, and skill. Other product features include question sets; vocabulary; human voice and text to speech options; paired text – which are paired selections of text by a common topic, theme, or literary element; and StepsReads – less complex versions of articles to aid in differentiation.

Teachers can assign articles online by setting up a class. The assignments will then be readily viewed on the student dashboard. Once assignments are completed, automatic reports are made and teachers can track student progress on articles read, comprehension questions, as well as vocabulary activities. The ease of having immediate data is a great feature that can assist teachers with instruction. As per interface and navigation, ReadWorks is simple and user-friendly in both teacher and student modes. If online access is not readily available or a printout is preferred, teachers have the option to print the articles and activities. 

Along with everything aforementioned, ReadWorks also provides tips and guidelines to support effectiveness. At no cost, the vast collection of curated material that ReadWorks offers as well as its features make it such a wonderful resource for supporting reading comprehension.