CommonLit in the News

Over the course of this year’s program, we’ll be featuring weekly interviews with the founders of each tech nonprofit in our 2016 cohort. This past week we sat down with Michelle Brown, founder of CommonLit, a digital resource that equips educators with high-quality, standards-aligned literacy tools to help students in grades 5-12 make significant improvements in reading and writing. An alum of Teach for America, Michelle shares why there’s such a critical need for a product like CommonLit, the teaching experiences that inspired her mission and lessons learned as a tech nonprofit founder.

It’s incredibly rewarding for us to see new tech nonprofits emerging and interest from investors, tech companies and entrepreneurs increasing as we continue to grow. We believe it’s critical to equip organizations solving social issues like human rights, health care, and education with the technology they need to create meaningful impact.

Open educational resources, or OER, have been around in one form or another for more than a decade. These resources come in a variety of platforms, including electronic textbooks, K-12 lesson plans, and worksheets. This trend has picked up steam in the past few years. [...] I interviewed CommonLit CEO Michelle Brown by phone to learn how her organization helps educators find appropriate OER...

“Tech is our business. And by applying it to challenges in education, anything becomes possible. This year’s Accelerator class is doing just that,” said Nicole Anderson, Assistant Vice President of Social Innovation, AT&T. “We’re eager to start working with them to help scale their solutions. We’re seeing the growth of last year’s class, and that builds excitement for this year.”

Every week, our educator-specific INSTRUCT newsletter contains a section called “S’Cool Tools,” where we list either popular or up-and-coming edtech tools. And throughout the 2015 year alone, we’ve showcased over 250 edtech tools in our S’Cool Tools section. Certain tools get more clicks than others, and as we close this year, we felt it pertinent to bring you the most popular S’Cool Tools of 2015.

“It is so important that students in middle and high school get frequent exposure to challenging non-fiction – this is at the core of what it means to be college ready. Now, thanks to the Society for Science, we can build rigorous lessons using timely, high-quality news from the scientific community. We look forward to adding more grade-appropriate science texts to our library.”

Today, the free website allows teachers and parents to access a curated digital collection of high-interest instructional materials designed to address the diverse needs of both high and low-skilled readers. It now serves roughly 70,000 students per day.

She started a student organization with around 15 other former reading teachers and graduate students while studying for her master’s degree at Harvard. That group became the launch team for CommonLit. They conducted a pilot study of the program in Boston Public Schools that received good results. In October, while she was working from the Marywood University Entrepreneurial Learning Pad, CommonLit was launched. There was very little publicity before the site went live, said Mrs. Brown. The team watched as users grew to “tens of thousands from all 50 states, and several thousands of users that are starting to pop up internationally.”

On June 16, Teach for America announced the winners of its 2015 Social Innovation Awards, which provide up to $100,000 in seed funding. Unlike previous years, edtech companies made a big appearance: CommonLit, which provides texts to literacy teachers, and Kinvolved, a communication tool for students’ support networks, won in the Overall Track category, receiving $50,000 and $75,000 respectively.

CommonLit is a nonprofit organization that delivers high-quality, free instructional materials to literacy teachers. At CommonLit.org, 5th-12th grade teachers can access a diverse, open collection of the best news articles, short stories, historical documents, scientific articles, and poems—all organized by the themes students love to discuss. “Our framework is based on the idea that a low-skilled reader is not a low-skilled thinker, and that every student, no matter where she goes to school, deserves to be challenged with the highest quality reading materials,” Brown says.

After teaching seventh-grade reading at one of the nation’s lowest-performing schools, then teaching the same subject at one of the nation’s highest-performing schools, former New Braunfelser and New Braunfels High School graduate Michelle Brown felt that something had to be done. So, she developed a website called CommonLit with the goal of improving literacy in the country.

CommonLit offers teachers a free collection of articles of articles, short stories, poems, and historical documents, organized into cross-cutting themes such as "Justice, Freedom, and Equality." Intended for middle-school readers, materials are sorted into three reading levels. That means all students can engage with texts and contribute to discussions and other project activities. Stephanie Cardella (@cardella112) applauded the site's focus on "big ideas in text".