Introducing Luna, Your New AI-powered Assistant

As educators, you know that prepping for back-to-school season picks up by mid-July. 

This year, there’s a new consideration that makes back-to-school planning a lot more interesting. Students, teachers, and administrators will return to a school year in which artificial intelligence (AI) will be a part of more classrooms and school offices than ever before. 

Edtech is at another inflection point, and teachers and administrators are at the forefront of having to determine when and how to appropriately integrate AI in the classroom. There have been plenty of buzzy new tools and add-ons popping up and clamoring for a spot in your tech stack—not to mention a nearly 20% increase in districts that reported planning to embrace AI in some way.  

Introducing: A new universe of opportunity for teaching and learning with your latest AI-powered assistant 

Our team has been working hard to ensure that when it comes to AI-powered tools, we start with what’s best for teachers and students. That’s been our commitment since Newsela launched.

Regardless of whether you’re hesitant to start using AI in the classroom or were an early adopter helping shape your district’s approach, our promise to you is the same as always: We’re here to be your trusted partner in delivering meaningful classroom learning for every student. 

This year, that promise expands to helping you navigate a new landscape of rapidly evolving AI technology so you can confidently decide what works best for you and your students…while still driving student outcomes. 

Today, we’re excited to introduce someone new to your roster: Luna! 

Think of Luna as your AI-powered teaching assistant, there to support lesson planning, activity design, graphic organizer creation, text differentiation, and so much more. 

What can Luna do?

Luna has been hard at work behind the scenes on our products for years and is finally ready to step into the spotlight. You'll notice a new design across our full product suite—in both Newsela’s subject products and soon in Formative—that indicates when and where Luna is available to help you save time and support student outcomes.  

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In Newsela ELA, Newsela Social Studies, and Newsela Science, 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.

We can’t wait to show you even more of what Luna can do! You'll see Luna popping up in various new ways across our products later this summer and throughout the school year. Stay tuned!

What makes Luna different?

Luna is not magic. Luna is purposeful technology that builds on Newsela’s foundation of over a decade of K-12 pedagogical expertise, learning science research and proven efficacy, thoughtfully curated and authentic content and activities, and real-time classroom data insights. And our team of data scientists is continuously gathering educator feedback and improving our product development with their expertise in AI.

Our products development efforts always start with a specific classroom use case and research foundation. Whether it’s addressing the need for more engaging, differentiated non-fiction texts or including more data-driven instructional decisions with real-time insights on formative assessments, our products originate from real classroom pain points. Developing new AI-powered features is no different.

We’ve focused on driving student outcomes from the start. You don’t have to take our word for it either. Studies show that students who use Newsela’s subject products achieve four additional months of literacy skill growth and nearly an additional year of social studies achievement by the end of the school year. And regular Formative users score higher on ELA and math standardized assessments. 

The AI features that we’ve released over the last few years build on the same instructional principles that have already helped drive real student growth, and we’re excited about the potential they have to take that impact even further.

And it should go without saying, but we’ll say it anyway because it’s important to us and to you: We always prioritize privacy and student outcomes. 

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. 

How Newsela’s AI tools have evolved

If you’ve used Newsela’s products over the years, you might recognize Luna. Our favorite learning-loving astronaut has been with us for a while now (with a few glow-ups along the way). 

Newsela launched in 2013 with a mission to support all students’ literacy through a wide universe of engaging articles at five reading levels. We’ve been a trusted provider of vetted, authentic content for over a decade. 

Over the years, we expanded our product suite to include solutions for relevant, engaging social studies lessons, science of reading-aligned ELA instruction, and real-world science learning. In 2023, we brought Formative’s daily instruction and district-wide assessment tools into our product suite to continue providing teachers with the real-time insights they need to make data-driven instructional decisions. And in 2024, we launched an AI-first tool to support writing practice across the curriculum. Rooting our development decisions in the latest learning sciences, our team’s combined experience and expertise in education has driven our product strategy every step of the way.

We’ve been incorporating AI and machine learning into our products for a while now. For example, we’ve leveraged machine learning for years to surface the best articles for your classroom through content recommendations. In more recent years, we’ve launched generative AI-powered features like checks for understanding, instructional planning supports, and guided highlighting to scaffold learning and make educational experiences even more personalized and engaging for students. We’ve also expanded activities in Formative with features like AI-generated practice sets and quiz answer hints.

We also saw a huge opportunity to leverage AI in a controlled, rubric-aligned use case to support students' writing. Writing practice across the curriculum is a crucial—but difficult to implement—component of supporting students’ growth. 

So in 2024, we launched Newsela Writing, an AI-powered writing practice assistant to nurture confident writing in every subject for grades 3-12. Notice the friendly astronaut that provides real-time, rubric-aligned feedback to students? That’s our pal, Luna, too! With Luna’s help, students see boosts in overall writing quality and the majority of teachers agree their students’ writing improves.

What’s next for Luna?

Just like your students, Luna continues to grow and improve. We’re building even more research-based, AI-powered features within our products to save teachers time for the most important work of all: Creating meaningful connections with students to support their learning.

Whenever you see Luna pop up on your screen or spot the new design on any of the buttons in our products, you’ll know you’re harnessing an AI tool powered by Newsela’s 10+ years of education and learning science expertise. 

So buckle up! We’re launching into a new frontier in teaching this year. Luna will help take the busywork out of your orbit, so you can focus on what matters most: your students.

‍Join our Virtual Back-to-School Kickoff Keynote Session on July 29 to learn more about how to navigate this new chapter in education technology and see some of our AI-powered product features in action.