The Fordham Institute for Advancing Educational Excellence has reviewed nine online ELA tools.

The Fordham Institute for Advancing Educational Excellence reviewed nine online ELA tools, which they’ve written about in The Right Tool for the Job: Improving Reading and Writing in the Classroom. The following description is an excerpt from the introduction:

"Most are free or low-cost, and while some resources (such as Newsela) are already in demand, we also aimed to highlight newer and lesser-known resources for the field. We also intentionally included several interactive, student-facing tools; these remain relatively rare in the ELA curricular landscape, which tends to include tools designed mostly for the use of teachers rather than students."

 For each online product, expert reviewers assessed:

  • What is the tool or product designed to do?
  • Is it intended to be aligned to college- and career-ready standards?
  • Does it include student assessments or data reporting for teachers?
  • How is it intended to be used, and how might the resource be better used by educators?
  • Is it organized logically and easy for teachers (and/or students) to use?
  • Does the tool include beneficial suggestions for how it might be integrated into a larger curriculum?
  • What are the tool’s overall strengths and weaknesses?

Read their full introduction or the collected reviews. Or, go directly to the reviewed sites:

Topic Area
Curriculum Development
Digital Literacy
ELA
Media Type
Website
Resource Type
Resource
PD Center
SABES English Language Arts Curriculum & Instruction PD Center