Annotations

With the Annotations feature, teachers and students can highlight and mark up articles. Educators with a paid subscription can use this ability to customize assignments with annotation conversations initiated by either students or teachers. Teachers and students with a free subscription can highlight and annotate in Newsela for personal use.

How teachers and students make annotations:

  1. Highlight text. The option to annotate will appear above the highlighted selection. Select this.

  2. In the margin, the annotations box will appear, select a color and enter your annotation. Click Save to save your annotation.

  3. Teachers, click Share to share the annotation with your class. Students can simply click Save.

  4. Click the annotation again to modify, unshare, or delete it. Clicking delete in the annotations box deletes both the highlighting and any annotation text.

  5. Click the leveler at the top of the page to change lexile levels, and add annotations for a different level.

Tips and Tricks

  • Be sure to change the level and annotate each level your students will read.

  • Be sure the Read Aloud feature is off. Even when paused annotations are disabled.

  • Use a laptop, desktop, or netbook to make teacher annotations.

  • For students, use the app when accessing Newsela from a mobile device or a laptop, desktop, or netbook.

Teachers can leave questions or other guidance for students in annotations. Students can see and respond to their teacher's annotations.

How to Create an Annotation for Teachers

  1. Highlight text. An annotations option will appear above the highlighted selection. Click this.

    Background section

  2. In the margin, the annotations box will appear. Select a color for your highlight and enter your annotation.

    Background section

  3. Click Share to share the annotation with your class.

  4. Click the leveler at the top of the page to change Lexile levels, and add annotations for that level.

Students can annotate at newsela.com, when using a computer or netbook, or on the Newsela mobile app

To annotate a piece of text on a laptop or netbook:

  1. Click and drag your curser over the text you'd like to annotate. The annotation option will appear above the selection. Click this

    Background section

  2. In the pop up to the right, add an observation, question, note, definition, or thought (based on what you think and/or your teacher's instructions)

  3. Select a color in which to annotate, using your teacher's instructions as a guide.

  4. Click "save" to save the annotation, and share it with your teacher.


Teachers can instruct students to make annotations with the Class Instructions. Teachers with a paid subscription can see and respond to their students' annotations.


Struggling to create annotations? Be sure the Read Aloud feature is off. Even when paused annotations are disabled.

Students

We recommend that students use the Newsela mobile app to annotate articles on mobile.

To annotate a segment of text,

  1. Tap, hold, and drag across the text you'd like to highlight.

  2. Select "annotate."

  3. Select a color and type your annotation into the text box that pops up.

  4. Tap save.

  5. Tap the "x" in the upper right corner to return to the article.

Educators

Teachers can only use newsela.com in their mobile browser. We recommend that teachers create and share annotations on a computer or netbook, because they do no have access to our mobile app. The annotations feature is not optimized for a mobile browser.