28 Peer-Recommended Online Resources for English Teachers

CommonLit is an exceptional online resource for educators and students alike. With its vast collection of high-quality reading materials and instructional tools, CommonLit offers an engaging and effective approach to literacy instruction. The platform provides a wide range of diverse texts, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and historical documents, spanning various grade levels. Its user-friendly interface and well-designed lessons facilitate seamless navigation and promote active reading strategies. Furthermore, CommonLit's robust assessment features enable teachers to track student progress and tailor instruction accordingly. By fostering critical thinking, comprehension, and analytical skills, CommonLit empowers learners to become proficient readers and thinkers. It is a valuable asset for any classroom seeking to enhance literacy education.

The Learning A-Z app is an exceptional educational resource that offers a comprehensive learning experience for students of all ages. The app provides a wide range of engaging and interactive content, ensuring a highly effective learning environment. The app’s focus has a strong connection to the purpose for the app and appropriate for the student. The interface is user-friendly, allowing easy navigation and seamless access to various educational materials, including leveled reading books, interactive activities, and assessments. The app's adaptive features and personalized learning approach cater to individual student needs, promoting skill development and academic growth. Student is provided specific feedback on reading rate, high frequency words, reading levels, comprehension etc. Specific performance summary or student product is saved in app and can be exported to the teacher or for an audience .With its robust content library and well-designed interface, the Learning A-Z app is a valuable tool for both educators and learners, making it an excellent choice for enhancing educational outcomes.

Ereading Worksheets is something that I have never used before. Looking at some of the worksheets I will definitely be using it going forward for assessments. The worksheets encourage higher order thinking, creating, evaluating and analyzing. I will have to look for lower level worksheets for students who aren't on grade level but over all the worksheets can be used for different units to test their retention of the strategies taught. The games that they have are engaging for the students even though they are older looking. I think the kids will really like using this website on their free time in class.

Common Lit is one of the best resources I have come across so far. I have the ability to create a class so that I can have an interactive lesson with the students. The students are able to read or listen to the audio, answer questions, and there is even a section for vocabulary words. I can also use this resource for differentiated instruction because it has allows the teacher to customize the lesson to fit the specific needs of the students. Overall, this app is a free resource and it is incredible.

Newsela offers interesting material but seems to cater to lower grades and might be more applicable to a social studies classroom than an English classroom. I can see its articles being most helpful for ELA on occasions when teachers find themselves teaching a text that touches on social issues--for example, a class reading science fiction might be interested in an article on Elon Musk's ambition to colonize outer space. Each text in Newsla comes with handy sample assignments, generally focused on reading comprehension.

CommonLit is very usable from both the teacher and student end, is customizable for differentiation, and has a wide range of resources and recommendations. One of the strongest aspects is the "paired texts" and "related media" that helps supplement readings by focusing on a theme or a subject in different contexts.

As a middle school Language Arts teacher, I am always searching for new ways to engage my students, and Actively Learn fits the bill! Actively Learn is a user-friendly little gold mine of resources for Language Arts, Social Studies, and Science teachers, making it ideal for interdisciplinary lesson use. It offers thousands of texts covering a diverse range of topics, making it appealing to everyone. It has many customizable options, including an annotation tool, customizable reading levels, and personalized lesson plans. The best part about this platform is that it promotes the use of higher order thinking skills, which is the goal for middle school students.
- Lisa M, Grades 6-8

CommonLit offers complete flexibility to alter content and settings to meet the needs of students and help them to achieve their diverse learning needs. The resource encourages the use of higher order thinking skills; including creating, evaluating, and analyzing literature and non-fiction texts in order to develop their reading comprehension skills.

-Shereka Fagan
ELA, 9-10

Common Lit offers complete flexibility to alter content and settings to meet the needs of students and help them to achieve their diverse learning needs. The resource encourages the use of higher order thinking skills; including creating, evaluating, and analyzing literature and non-fiction texts in order to develop their reading comprehension skills.

-Shereka Fagan
ELA, 9-10

Actively Learn is a fantastic resource. You have the ability to upload a text in PDF version and add questions to the text. I can see how this may facilitate more student interaction with the text. I find that students do not interact with the text when they read on their own. There are also great articles that pair with a novel we may be reading in class. This is useful for when you want to dive deeper with the social aspect of the text.

Quill.org aims to teach students grammar rules when writing simple to complex sentences. It provides an assessment, then recommends practice skills based on assessment performance. Students receive immediate feedback with each sentence they write. The app facilitates the skill of analyzing when students must revise paragraphs for grammar, etc. Experience shows some students were motivated by, and enjoyed, the app while others were not as impressed. Students and teachers receive a performance summary showing what areas in grammar students need the most work in and how much improvement has been made with a post- assignment assessment.

I recommend using AP Springboard as resource for all ELA teachers as it provides immediate feedback to students and is aligned with state standards. The Springboard online texts are challenging in content, however the online platform is very user-friendly-- that is for both teachers and students. I use AP Springboard questions as a bell-ringer at least once a week; I also find that by using AP texts in standard ELA classes I am able to expose the students to higher-level thinking.

CommonLit is my go-to online resource for grade 9 ELA.

The app's customization settings provide translations in more than 35 languages (i.e. Arabic, Spanish, and Tagalog). Teachers have the option to assign text with Guided Reading Mode, which prompts students to answer comprehension questions as they read. This feature is especially useful in providing differentiated instruction.

Additional activities include self-grading multiple choice assessment questions and suggested discussion topics. There are many more worthwhile features on CommonLit, so check it out!

Flocabulary does the amazing feat of combining catchy tunes and animations with educational content. The teacher can assign a video to be just a video, or a video with a quiz, vocabulary cards or game, break it down (using evidence), read and respond, lyric lab (create your own song), or a combination of all. I have found content about poetry, poets, grammar, citations, big historical events, performance anxiety, and I look forward to discovering more. The students often repeat the raps and songs used, making learning and recall fun.

iXL- iXL offers a wide variety of exercises that directly address and reinforce the standards. Quizzes can be given, homework can be assigned, and progress is extremely trackable. Students get to watch where and how they grow while identifying strengths and addressing weaknesses. It serves as an excellent tool to bolster understanding of specific content and standards alignment is paramount. Exercises and quizzes are able to be modified and questions and exercises are targeted to students individual learning levels. It is a great tool to track progress and offers measurable growth factors. Learners and readers are empowered by watching their scores grow!

The purpose of the Purdue Owl Writing Lab is to offer online resource materials for all types of writing, from school to real life. Their subject-specific writing resources stretch beyond education to healthcare, journalism, translingual writing, and more. The site offers some flexibility to alter content and settings to meet student needs; however, a student must put in real effort to direct their query and analyze exactly what resources they need to use the site properly. The site allows for specific feedback, with incredibly detailed advice, such as the pages about citations that students can use for any paper in MLA, APA, or Chicago. Again, this app does not provide what some might think of as ‘easy’ access — students must take on the responsibility of searching for what they need and perusing the detailed instructions provided. (However, there is a search function that might lift this burden.) The app certainly encourages the use of higher-order thinking skills, including creating, evaluating, and analyzing, by crossing many disciplines and approaches to writing. Students can launch and operate the app independently, but without some modeling from the teacher, students may perceive the site as “more schoolwork” and may be off-task when directed to use it. There is no student performance summary, as that’s not what the site is designed for, but activities around research or citations can be designed with this site in mind to display students’ ability to use the site and apply the knowledge found on it.

CommonLit helps ELA teachers use research-based instructional routines in literacy in their daily lessons. CommonLit has high-quality instructional resources and assessments that give teachers information on how students are performing on key skills at their grade level and where they might need further support. There are multiple customization options to meet student need: text-to-speech to support students struggling with fluency or decoding, options to slow down audio or replay audio, lessons that translate into 30+ languages to support ELL learners, a guided-reading mode that supports student comprehension, an annotation tool so students can highlight and take notes while they read that teachers can monitor in real time. Teachers can provide specific feedback on students' annotations or short-answer responses. CommonLit easily integrates with Google Classroom, and students can launch and operate assignments independently. Students find the content engaging and relevant. There is opportunity for discussion, partner work, and making text-to self connections. Additionally, essential questions drive students to explore topics and ideas connected to the world around them. Teachers can view individual students' Student Performance reports that list all of their assessments, assignments, scores, short answer responses, and teacher feedback. These reports contain overall averages, multiple choice averages, short answer averages, and all short answer responses and feedback. Teachers can also download reports for all the students in the class thereby exporting student performance summaries for themselves or an audience.

Quill is a free resource that offers well organized and appropriate grammar exercises for grades 6-12. It is a handy resource to use in the classroom because it offers quick skill building exercises for students on grammar and punctuation that can be used as a bell ringer or "do now" activity, including exercises that require students to edit a piece of writing that requires several grammatical skills. Students can launch Quill independently, which allows those students who need additional support to work at home on additional assigned exercises. The teacher can assign exercises individually or by class, allowing for differentiation. Best of all, Quill provides an excellent data collection and analysis platform that allows students and the teacher to track their progress.

Kahoot! is a fun, game-based resource for teachers looking for a suitable change-of-pace learning experience for their students. Teachers can either use an existing Kahoot! or create their own, customizing the information to be most relevant to your lesson, allowing you strict control over the learning environment. Students log in to the platform, and the class can choose from a number of different gaming environments, from individual competition, to small group informational set ups. As can be expected with a bunch of game-addicted teens, engagement is quite high, and enthusiasm rampant. Teachers can use data mined from the game to determine areas of relative strength or weakness amongst their classes, and identify areas that still require more targeted lessons. The pre-crafted Kahoots! can run hit or miss, though they can certainly work in a pinch, but I've found custom-making the games tends to have better buy in from the class.

Common Lit offers a wide range of varieties aimed to enhance a teacher’s ability to encourage better reading, writing and comprehension skills needed to improve their grade work. Its assortment of writing prompts, Data analysis, thematic units, self-awareness tools and other features makes it easy for students to access the help they need in areas that needs improvements. With a wide range of genres to choose from, learners can study from options including fiction, non-fiction, poetry and historical documents.
-Givoughn Tomlinson
ELA 2, 10th Grade

As a middle school ELA teacher, one of my regular challenges is finding methods for student review of content that is both effective and engaging. Kahoot is a tool that I have found is incredibly helpful for this, as it is very customizable, easily usable for students, and engaging. It is a resource I can structure to the needs of my students however they might need it, allowing for endless use. It also provides fun, friendly competition, which is popular among this age group.

Common Lit provides educators multiple ways to explore literature. It can be used to support student learning through discussion prompts and journal prompts. The platform can also assist educators with an entry point to new material and supplement an existing curriculum. CommonLit360 provides resources that are designed with scope and sequence for a range of grades as well. Common Lit makes it easy for teachers to inspire students to engage in learning.

NoRedInk! is useful both as a primary resource and as a supplement to target various reading and writing skills in English classes. It is best if your institution has a premium subscription that will unlock all modules, but the free version still offers some features worth using. Students can sign in using either Clever or directly via their Google account, and it is easy to sync them to your class with either of these accounts. Upon signing in, students are asked to select various media of interest which will be used to personalize grammatical exercises with content they may have seen or read. The user interface is straightforward, uncluttered and easy for students to navigate. You can assign modules that target specific writing and grammar skills, such as “Commonly Confused Words,” “Clarity and Style”, “Sentences, Phrases and Clauses,” etc. Students view a tutorial, are given practice questions, and must answer a certain number correctly to proceed. If they enter a wrong answer, they receive an explanation and some clarification. If a student perpetually answers questions wrong, you can see on your side that they are “stuck”, allowing you to identify a need for personal intervention. Sometimes students do become frustrated when they end up in this situation, but it’s not a fault with the app itself. It does feature adaptive exercises that vary in difficulty in response to a student’s performance.
Besides modules, you can assign writing assignments and have students write directly in the provided text window. You can choose from pre-set prompts related to commonly-taught texts or create your own assignment. Word count can be automatically tracked, and any prompts, readings and/or customizable rubrics can be uploaded. Additionally, I’ve had success with “Guided Drafts” where students can view a tutorial for how to structure introductions, body paragraphs, and conclusions in the sidebar as they write. A downside is that work is not autosaved, so students must be reminded to click ‘Save’ before closing their browser window so their work is not lost. Overall, I recommend using NoRedInk! at least to supplement instruction at any level of ELA.

CommonLit is an amazing online resource for English teachers looking to strengthen student learning. As an online teaching library, CommonLit hosts hundreds of various genre reading texts to choose from. Additionally, CommonLit offers target lessons focused on a particular standard(s).These features are beneficial as students practice improving performance for NJSLA testing. CommonLit also has the option for students to complete a lesson independently via Google Classroom. These lessons include Do Now/Warm-Up activities, guided questions, videos, and online assessments.