At Newsela, we believe teachers are the ultimate curators of learning experiences. They deserve tools that will amplify their impact. Teachers, administrators, and students—just like the rest of us—are increasingly exploring new ways to leverage AI to make their lives easier, generate new ideas, and solve pressing needs.
When it comes to AI tools for education, there are opportunities for positive classroom impact, potential areas of caution, and steep new learning curves. No matter how clever or powerful these new solutions are, however, there will always be a need for the uniquely human ability of teachers to empathize, connect, inspire, and smile with students. Students still need authentic, vetted content to support their learning. Teachers still need opportunities to build relationships with their students to meet their individual learning needs. What’s changed is the capabilities for speed, personalization, and seemingly endless new ways to create content, explore concepts, and automate and optimize tasks.
What is Newsela's philosophy on AI in education?
As you navigate this new frontier, we want to be transparent about our position on artificial intelligence in education and how Newsela uses it in our products.
- AI applications in the classroom should be purposeful, not just productive. We believe that student outcomes should always be a priority. We build our products and features to optimize strong, research-based pedagogical practices that drive proven, lasting student outcomes, while also saving teachers time.
- We operate under the strong belief that teachers are central to designing and delivering the learning experience in the classroom for their students—and we build our solutions accordingly.
- Our use of AI is informed by the depth of our experience in education. We’ve been a trusted provider of vetted, authentic content for over a decade. We ensure our machine learning models have the right context, behaviors, and pedagogical research to deliver outputs that are valuable and safe in a classroom setting.
- The teacher-student connection is where learning is at its best. AI should be used to save teachers’ time and make certain tasks easier, creating space and time for teachers to have more powerful one-on-one moments in the classroom.
- Teachers will be aware of the student experience so they can ensure it aligns with what’s best for their students. They’ll also be made aware of AI-powered features in our products.
- Privacy is thoroughly protected for every user. The teams and AI systems involved in leveraging the data are not able to associate it with an individual.
- We employ a vigorous training and testing process that uses trusted offline and online metrics, while also leveraging the knowledge of our subject matter experts, to ensure the performance of algorithms. This multi-layered approach ensures the highest standards in the development of our AI systems while never losing the human element of what teaching and learning are all about.
- We also know that it’s critical that education products are built with teacher input. We leverage robust research, teacher feedback, and in-classroom experiences to drive the most valuable solutions at every step in the development process.
Today, we use AI to power features across Newsela products
For Newsela ELA, Newsela Social Studies, and Newsela Science, we leverage AI in:
- Article planning supports (main idea, key terms, discussion questions, and before-reading activity ideas for each text)
- Generating questions for checks for understanding
- Generating prompts for guided highlighting
- Generating tier 3 vocabulary definitions
- Some paragraph-level translations (our whole article Spanish translations are always human-reviewed)
For Formative, AI supports:
- Generating standards-aligned questions, answer hints, answer choice explanations or rationales, and writing prompts
- Generating lessons, classroom assessments, and practice sets
- Digitizing worksheets from PDFs
- Text translations
For Newsela Writing, we use AI to power:
- Delivering real-time student writing feedback, aligned to a chosen rubric
- Generating writing prompts for assignments
At Newsela, our goal is to open up teachers’ ability to do what they do best: bring learning to life for their students in a deeply personal, human way.
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