CommonLit in the News

CommonLit CEO on Addressing Learning Loss from Pandemic

The Business of Giving with Denver Frederick

October 28, 2022

CommonLit is a nonprofit education technology organization dedicated to ensuring that all students, especially those in Title I schools, graduate with the reading, writing, communication, and problem-solving skills they need to be successful in college and beyond. They have been especially busy since the lockdown and are now helping create solutions to address the learning loss that occurred as a result.

Over one million teachers use CommonLit in more than 80,000 schools. By fall semester of 2019, just months after launch, over 603,000 students had used the Annotation Tool, creating 3,210,156 Annotations and 5,029,973 highlights. So it comes as no surprise that the Annotation Tool, with its newly improved natural language processing, has proven very useful within its first year - close to 2.5 million annotations were logged.

Innovative, technology-enabled interventions can play an essential role in personalizing the process of remediation and acceleration of student learning. This is critical as districts nationwide work to address widening learning gaps as a result of school closures caused by the pandemic.

Michelle Brown: Founder & CEO of CommonLit, Inc.

Our Inclusive Future Podcast

January 24, 2022

Former teacher Michelle Brown is on a mission to improve reading and writing skills for children around the globe. That's why she created CommonLit, an education technology non-profit that has grown to reach 80,000 schools in the United States and over 20,000,000 users worldwide.

Technology allows educators, parents and students to pinpoint where they are in their studies in an instant, providing the insight needed to create targeted, personalized learning opportunities that meets students where they are... CommonLit launched CommonLit 360 to one million teachers on June 1st. This new, digital and free high-quality literary curriculum for kids in grades 6–10 uses evidence-based practices and technology to teach reading and writing in a way that fully engages students in the process.

Michelle Brown shares advice on how parents can prevent summer learning loss.

Michelle Brown, a former classroom teacher, is the founder and CEO of CommonLit. Under her leadership, CommonLit has become a go-to resource for educators around the globe. Michelle sat down with us to share more about what her organization is doing to help create a more inclusive future through literacy education.

Edtech had the opportunity to help address these inequities. In some ways, edtech has risen to this challenge, but the field has also learned some things the hard way. Here are four major lessons our industry should take from the pandemic.

Digital library and reading apps and websites make it easier than ever to help students dive into text on their own terms and better understand what they're reading. These picks -- our favorite e-book and e-reading platforms -- let students browse libraries of text, read at their own pace and level, engage in discussions in the margins, or answer questions and prompts as they read to guide and gauge learning. [CommonLit allows teachers to] access a hefty collection of reliable, ready-to-print, leveled passages that allow you to tailor lessons, assign online reading, and track progress.

This spring, we witnessed thousands of different distance learning pilots running in schools all across the country... This is an opportunity for educators to embrace and emulate the rapid iterative prototyping approach that has become the mainstay for advancement and innovation in our start-up-driven economy, while leveraging technology to expand the way our children develop and learn. As an example, four high-poverty middle schools in New York City working with the EdTech nonprofit, CommonLit, used the spring to improve not only how they deliver instruction virtually, but also how they engage families.

A Coronavirus AMA: 31 questions and answers about COVID-19

GatesNotes: The Blog of Bill Gates

March 19, 2020

It is a huge problem that schools will likely be shut down for the next few months. I am impressed by the creative approaches that many teachers are coming up with to teach remotely. (If you are a teacher reading this, thank you for the work you’re doing.) But I know that not everyone is set up to teach remotely. There are a lot of good online resources out there, including Khan Academy, CommonLit, Illustrative Mathematics, Zearn, and Scholastic.

WLA has worked closely with nonprofit CommonLit on a reading and writing application used in ninth and tenth grade English. Grade level reading is available in thematic units with voiceover text available for students who benefit from it. Formed by middle school teacher Michelle Brown in 2014, CommonLit's free reading platform has been accessed in over 60,000 schools. It includes 2,000 high-quality reading passages for grades three through 12 supported with assessments, data, and teacher professional learning. The organization has been recognized with awards and funding from leading foundations.