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CommonLit for content discovery and curricular connections
School Library Journal
As librarians, when we gear up for a new school year, it’s exciting to have a few new strategies for engaging learners with literature and for building our own literature discovery/selection toolkit. You’ll absolutely want to introduce CommonLit to your classroom teachers and you’ll absolutely use it yourself to make curricular discoveries and to help teachers make connections.
August 21, 2016
Read moreCommonLit: Giving Students and Teachers a Toolkit for Increased Literacy
Fast Forward
Over the course of this year’s program, we’ll be featuring weekly interviews with the founders of each tech nonprofit in our 2016 cohort. This past week we sat down with Michelle Brown, founder of CommonLit, a digital resource that equips educators with high-quality, standards-aligned literacy tools to help students in grades 5-12 make significant improvements in reading and writing. An alum of Teach for America, Michelle shares why there’s such a critical need for a product like CommonLit, the teaching experiences that inspired her mission and lessons learned as a tech nonprofit founder.
July 18, 2016
Read moreMeet Fast Forward's 2016 Accelerator Cohort
Fast Forward
It’s incredibly rewarding for us to see new tech nonprofits emerging and interest from investors, tech companies and entrepreneurs increasing as we continue to grow. We believe it’s critical to equip organizations solving social issues like human rights, health care, and education with the technology they need to create meaningful impact.
June 29, 2016
Read more"How to Find Quality K-12 Open Educational Resources"
Education Week
Open educational resources, or OER, have been around in one form or another for more than a decade. These resources come in a variety of platforms, including electronic textbooks, K-12 lesson plans, and worksheets. This trend has picked up steam in the past few years. [...] I interviewed CommonLit CEO Michelle Brown by phone to learn how her organization helps educators find appropriate OER...
June 14, 2016
Read moreAT&T Kicks Off Aspire Accelerator With 6 Leading Ed-Tech Startups
AT&T Corporate
“Tech is our business. And by applying it to challenges in education, anything becomes possible. This year’s Accelerator class is doing just that,” said Nicole Anderson, Assistant Vice President of Social Innovation, AT&T. “We’re eager to start working with them to help scale their solutions. We’re seeing the growth of last year’s class, and that builds excitement for this year.”
May 8, 2016
Read moreCounting Down EdSurge's Top Ten S’Cool Tools of 2015
EdSurge
Every week, our educator-specific INSTRUCT newsletter contains a section called “S’Cool Tools,” where we list either popular or up-and-coming edtech tools. And throughout the 2015 year alone, we’ve showcased over 250 edtech tools in our S’Cool Tools section. Certain tools get more clicks than others, and as we close this year, we felt it pertinent to bring you the most popular S’Cool Tools of 2015.
December 29, 2015
Read moreSociety for Science & the Public partners with CommonLit to provide Common Core content
Society for Science & the Public
“It is so important that students in middle and high school get frequent exposure to challenging non-fiction – this is at the core of what it means to be college ready. Now, thanks to the Society for Science, we can build rigorous lessons using timely, high-quality news from the scientific community. We look forward to adding more grade-appropriate science texts to our library.”
November 10, 2015
Read moreThe 2015 Tech 25
Washington Life Magazine
Today, the free website allows teachers and parents to access a curated digital collection of high-interest instructional materials designed to address the diverse needs of both high and low-skilled readers. It now serves roughly 70,000 students per day.
November 1, 2015
Read moreWebsite Gives Teachers, Kids A Better Chance
Washington Times
She started a student organization with around 15 other former reading teachers and graduate students while studying for her master’s degree at Harvard. That group became the launch team for CommonLit. They conducted a pilot study of the program in Boston Public Schools that received good results. In October, while she was working from the Marywood University Entrepreneurial Learning Pad, CommonLit was launched. There was very little publicity before the site went live, said Mrs. Brown. The team watched as users grew to “tens of thousands from all 50 states, and several thousands of users that are starting to pop up internationally.”
July 28, 2015
Read moreTFA Social Innovation Award Honors Edtech Companies
EdSurge
On June 16, Teach for America announced the winners of its 2015 Social Innovation Awards, which provide up to $100,000 in seed funding. Unlike previous years, edtech companies made a big appearance: CommonLit, which provides texts to literacy teachers, and Kinvolved, a communication tool for students’ support networks, won in the Overall Track category, receiving $50,000 and $75,000 respectively.
June 16, 2015
Read moreMeet the Game-Changers: 2015 Social Innovation Award Winners Announced
Teach for America
CommonLit is a nonprofit organization that delivers high-quality, free instructional materials to literacy teachers. At CommonLit.org, 5th-12th grade teachers can access a diverse, open collection of the best news articles, short stories, historical documents, scientific articles, and poems—all organized by the themes students love to discuss. “Our framework is based on the idea that a low-skilled reader is not a low-skilled thinker, and that every student, no matter where she goes to school, deserves to be challenged with the highest quality reading materials,” Brown says.
June 15, 2015
Read moreNB Grad Builds Website Aiming to Better Literacy
Herald Zeitung
After teaching seventh-grade reading at one of the nation’s lowest-performing schools, then teaching the same subject at one of the nation’s highest-performing schools, former New Braunfelser and New Braunfels High School graduate Michelle Brown felt that something had to be done. So, she developed a website called CommonLit with the goal of improving literacy in the country.
December 22, 2014
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