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 we use it in our products—across Formative and Newsela. These principles guide all decisions when developing Luna, our AI-powered teaching assistant across Newsela’s full product suite.
- 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.
- We always prioritize privacy and student safety. 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. We don’t put anything AI-generated in front of students that teachers don’t have the ability to see. And while we evaluate every AI model we develop, we hold student-facing models to an especially high bar so teachers can trust what’s delivered without taking on extra work. We also do not use student personal data to train our AI models.
- 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, Luna powers AI features across Newsela products
In Newsela ELA, Newsela Social Studies, and Newsela STEM, Luna:
- Powers planning supports for articles.
- Generates pre-populated, editable, and exportable graphic organizers.
- Creates questions for checks for understanding and guided highlighting prompts.
- Defines in-text tier 3 vocabulary.
- Supports paragraph-level text translations in 40+ languages. (Our whole-article Spanish translations are always human-reviewed.)
In Newsela Writing, Luna:
- Generates writing prompts for assignments.
- Delivers real-time, rubric-aligned feedback on student writing.
- Surfaces trends in student performance with rubric-aligned reporting.
- Automatically grades student assignments based on rubric criteria.
In Formative, Luna:
- Generates lessons and activities.
- Digitizes worksheets from PDFs.
- Creates standards-aligned questions and answer choice explanations.
- Translates activities in 30+ languages.
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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