App of the Week

News-O-Matic  by Press 4 Kids has been rated as one of the top learning apps from both teaching and parent organizations and has a 4.8 out of 5 stars in the app store. It has been around for over a year, but is my new favorite discovery.

What is News-O-Matic?

It is a daily news app for students with the target ages of 7-10 (grades 1-4). Kids can read 5 current events stories daily in English or Spanish. If you pay a one time fee (9.99), it unlocks many other features such as answering questions, interactive puzzles, chat, comments, videos, and being able to send a note to the editor Russ. This weeks topics include the president talking about immigration, the movie Frozen, record snowfalls and kids around the world. The app aligns with common core standards and every article is reviewed for suitability by a child psychologist. A teacher can have discussion questions emailed to them if they register on their website, and have students take quizzes for comprehension that can be tracked over time. The app also has a text-to-speech feature that reads the article to a student if they highlight the text. Yet another well-thought-out feature is citation information present with every article to help students learn how to credit sources.

So far in our speech room it has been very popular. It can be very challenging to find news content that is school appropriate and engaging, but this is perfect so far. Today I have used it to have students work on reading fluency, articulation in reading and conversation and for expressive/receptive vocabulary tasks (prefixes/suffixes, synonyms and antonyms). I also love that our students are thinking critically and learning about the world around them.

Please see the following for a video to check it out yourself!