Ciera's ILA Effective Website #5 RocketLit

RocketLit (https://www.rocketlit.com/) formerly known as Birdbrain is an adaptive and personalized learning platform that serves reading to students at their independent level. Students read the same content at different levels of complexity and fluidly move up reading levels as they improve. RocketLit serves adaptive reading from the 3rd-12th grade reading levels to students in Science and Social Studies, to help both struggling readers and challenge advanced students.

RocketLit serves tailored reading to every student in a classroom, including struggling readers, advanced students, and everyone in between. RocketLit's differentiated Science and Social Studies articles are written at seven different reading levels and delivered to each student at their specific independent reading level. Comprehension is fluidly assessed, and students can fluctuate between reading levels as they improve or struggle with material. Teachers are able to instantly differentiate for all students and know exactly what to reteach with RocketLit reports on domain-specific vocabulary words and concepts. 

RocketLit does have a cost however teachers can sign up for a free one-month trial. The website has step-by-step guidance and video tutorials to help teachers jump right in to browsing articles and creating assignments. When students sign in for the first time, they complete an assessment to place their reading level, but teachers can also override that placement. Teachers can view usage data and scores on multiple choice quizzes to get a general sense of how students are doing. Teachers can have students investigate the quiz questions by highlighting where they can find the answer in the text, look up new words, or create presentations demonstrating what they've learned. Though the reading levels stretch up to 12th grade, RocketLit is probably best for elementary and middle school, as the basic writing style and topics are static. It could be useful for ELLs of any grade level depending on their readiness.

Overall, I think RocketLit is a neat online resource because of the science and history articles. RocketLit has articles and teachers can browse and search by units or standards. This is a great resource because the article is then tailored to that specific grade level and standard.