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Remote Learning Tools
With remote learning becoming a necessity, LightSail’s unique tools ensure that your classroom can adapt at a moment’s notice to the updates that are released by your district.
Hybrid Teaching Tools Feature Set
Teacher Dashboard
- • Actively monitor your students' current activity including their reading minutes, Cloze activity, and books being read directly from your Dashboard.
- • View your Class Leaderboard and your students' rankings.
- • View your students' progress towards reaching their weekly reading goals.
Chat Privately With Your Students
- • Chat with individual students by sending them personal reminders and messages to their Dashboard.
- • Fast, easy, and effective way for students to communicate with teachers.
- • Students are prevented from chatting privately with each other.
Class Chat
- • Send classwide announcements with one message.
- • Initiate classroom dialogue around a book, subject, or lesson.
- • Control the conversation by ensuring that messages are not lost and all students get to participate in the conversation by allowing the teacher to mute and unmute selected students.
- • Students can send messages anonymously in the class chat so they feel comfortable participating. A student is only anonymous to their peers and not to their teacher.
Group Chat for Educators
- • Collaborate about planning and content with common grade level teachers in your school or across the district.
- • Create private/customized groups for intensive discussion, mentoring, and coaching.
- • Seamlessly distribute targeted content to teachers and students with in-text sharing.
- My Library
- IN A BOOK
- word work
- MY JOURNAL
- library COLLECTIONS
LightSail’s Lexile™ based Educational eReader is designed with visibility and engagement in mind. Our Reader increases the visibility and accountability of reading minutes and assessment performance and responses.
CONTENT RICH • MULTIMODAL • CUSTOMIZABLE DIGITAL LIBRARIES FOR ALL BUDGETS
LightSail’s library is designed to scale to meet the needs of every reader and curriculum. You can choose from two starter libraries that are complementary, either 2,000 or 6,000 assessed books, depending on your budget. These libraries are sure to get your digital ELA educators super excited. From there, we’ll help you build a “just-right” digital library for your school, your district, and your classrooms even further. With an additional 100,000 books to purchase from over 20 over the world’s largest publisher and dozens of boutique publishers as well. In addition LightSail has thousands of Spanish books.
Books enhanced with:
- •Over 40,000 curriculum aligned questions and activities
- •world class educational video clips
- •contextual action clips bring illustrations and content to life
IN A BOOK
From the moment a student opens a book to the moment they exit, LightSail keeps track of their reading minutes, words defined, total word count, total pages read, all Cloze assessments, and any answered Short Response or Multiple Choice question from the book.
We have built and wrapped 7 layers of value-added pedagogy, literacy assessment and supports around the engaging LightSail texts and books:
(1) Short response questions (2) Multiple choice questions (3) Tens of thousands of educational 1~5 minute long videos related to each book, to further enhance the reader’s understanding of the topic of the book (4) Tens of thousands of Action Clips 10~40 second silent video clips that are contextualized and hyperlinked to key vocabulary in the book being read by the student (5) Millions of Cloze / Vocabulary assessments for Lexile growth assessment (6) In-depth picture dictionary (7) Word Work for remediation.
A student can define any word in a book and choose to listen to a word being read aloud. LightSail also provides parts of speech and syllables for all words on a page.
Teachers and students can embed Thoughts within a book. A teacher can share a Thought with the entire class and a student can share a Thought with their teacher. Cloze assessments are found by clicking on a green box. The student will then be asked to select the correct answer from four possible choices.
word work
LightSail’s Word Work feature does precisely what it implies: It helps your students work on vocabulary words they have missed over the course of their reading.
Word Work is designed to prompt your student in multiple ways to review and practice common vocabulary challenges. When a student exits out of or completes a book, they are prompted to retake any missed reading Clozes (fill-in-the-blanks). Through Book Overlays, the History tab, and the Word Work tab, a student can see precisely which assignments require further study. And a teacher can also send their child a reminder to perform Word Work from the Vocabulary tab of their own Dashboard.
With Word Work, you don’t have to worry that your student is senselessly practicing information they have already mastered. It is a tool that gives your students focused practice and additional support targeted specifically to areas they need to work on.
MY JOURNAL
As a reading journal, My Journal gives your students the ability to record their thoughts, questions, and favorite quotes directly from the books they are reading. From any book, they can access their journal and see all of their entries. From there, they can create a new entry, edit previous ones, select text from the book to quote, and include citations with the click of a button!
My Journal entries do not have to be associated with their reading. My Journal is accessible from the Main Menu on your student’s Dashboard; iit can be a space for them to write about whatever topic they choose. Students can create entries about anything from how their day went, to what they did on vacation, to their personal goals and dreams.
- • Students can select to keep a journal private or share it with the teacher/parent. Students can also create Shared Responses and include quotes from books.
- • Teachers can promote active reading and a love of writing by offering journaling opportunities. Journals can also be used to monitor student comprehension and reader response through written assignments.
library COLLECTIONS
A Library Collection is a group of books, videos, and Action Clips themed around a particular topic. LightSail contains many Library Collections; however, a teacher can also put together their own to share with their learners.
This feature is particularly useful when creating a Unit or for thematic learning because it allows a teacher to curate content of their choosing and present it to their students for independent study. It also works perfectly for seasonal topics. You can assign a Collection to your class for a certain time period, after which, it expires and is removed from your learners’ libraries.
You can create a seasonal theme to share with your class- one about summer break or Christmas. You can also create a unit of study for topics you’re explicitly teaching in class, like World War II or The Civil Rights Movement. Alternatively, prompt your students to read and learn more on topics they’re already interested in by presenting them with curated Collections about a favorite sport or getting a family pet. The number of ways to use Library Collections is limitless!
- Essay Writing
- Inquiry Writing
- Authentic Writing
- Informal Writing Workshops
- Writing Skill Builder
Students engage in a comprehensive digital writing experience that supports planning, drafting, receiving feedback, and revising and editing.
Essay Writing
The word "essay" makes many students grumble because they don't know where or how to start. They bring prior experiences indicating that essays are time consuming, rigorous, and energy intensive. Unfortunately, these reasons stop many students before they ever get started writing. LightSail's Essay Module promotes recursive writing as a Best Practice. It provides students the support and confidence to plan, draft, reflect on feedback, and revise/edit with the support of their teacher. These feedback cycles grow strong writers and a classroom culture of academic success.
LightSail's Essay module also supports a teacher's design of student friendly pre-planning and draft templates that provide tips and structure to grow an essay through multiple feedback cycles. Teachers can use a template or custom rubric to provide targeted and specific feedback to each writer. Help your students transition post-secondary by exposing them to advanced writing skills such as MLA/APA citations and paraphrasing and learning through focused feedback.
Inquiry Writing
Grow a student’s knowledge of a topic by promoting research. LightSail supports the research process by using a K-W-L graphic organizer to drive inquiry based learning and research methods. Empower your learners to grow their knowledge base with inquiry-driven research. Give students the skills and confidence to distill information and formally express it to an academic audience.
LightSail’s Inquiry Module also supports a teacher’s design of student-friendly pre-planning and draft templates that contain tips and supportive structures to grow an inquiry report through multiple feedback cycles. Teachers can use a template or custom rubric to provide targeted and specific feedback to each writer based on their response. Help your students transition post-secondary by exposing them to advanced writing skills such as MLA/APA citations and paraphrasing and learning through focused feedback.
Authentic Writing
Authentic Writing directly relates books to real-life writing scenarios by allowing a student to take a problem, concept, idea, or situation from a book and write about it in an authentic format. LightSail does this by pairing books in its wide-ranging library with various, creative prompts, specific to your student’s developmental level. Example Authentic Writing assignments may include reading a story that centers around a problem within a community, then responding to that by writing an editorial for the local newspaper, a letter to the mayor, or a new community policy.
The creative possibilities of Authentic Writing assignments are endless. The true learning value is two-fold. First, the pairing of the writing assignment with the book gives context and enrichment beyond what reading or writing alone would provide. Secondly, the real-life writing scenarios allow a student to express themselves personally, feel invested in their finished writing piece, and recognize how writing is used in the real world each day.
Informal Writing Workshops
Informal Writing Workshops are fun, gamified writing prompts that teach through real-life writing encounters that children will want to engage in. These workshops provide grade-appropriate scenarios for children to experience writing in an organic and relatable way like mock social media posts, fun and creative free-writing prompts, and even hashtag challenges. Children know that you don’t write essays daily in the real world, but asking them to compose a thoughtful Tweet on a current event or comment on a friend’s meme makes the need for writing real!
Teachers can assign the workshops, either choosing specific prompts for their students or offering them a “burst” of prompts that are determined by the randomized spinning of a wheel. Children can also opt to take an Informal Writing Workshop on their own and spin the wheel to see what kind of prompt they will get. While these assignments are not gradable, to encourage fun and active participation, a parent or teacher can like or comment on a child’s response to provide encouragement and feedback. This tool gives teachers an invaluable opportunity to guide their child toward 21st century literacy.
Writing Skill Builder
Writing Skill Builder is just one of many writing-related features within LightSail Reader. It allows teachers to quickly and easily customize assignments for each learner's language, writing, and vocabulary learning gaps. These skill building assignments neither require a student to actually write, nor do they require a teacher to grade their completed work because LightSail Reader does that for you!
Instead, Writing Skill Builder assignments teach a multitude of skills on topics such as sentence structure, word usage, capitalization, parts of speech, prefixes, and even reasoning skills - all tailored to the grade level and needs of each learner. When a teacher creates an assignment, they fill out the general information such as the assignment name, due date, and description. You can even add photos and Action Clips from the thousands included in the LightSail Reader platform to your description.
The directions can be shared in print or audio to differentiate for dominant modalities. Then, the most important part: Choosing a grade level. Based on the grade a teacher selects, a list of possible questions is offered. The teacher can sort this list by skill type and standard, selecting the perfect questions to address a unique learner's challenges. One student may need to focus on capitalization and punctuation, while another may need practice with word usage.
There are many different styles of questions a student can be offered as well. Formats include multiple choice, multi-select (more than one possible answer), drag-and-drop, and fill-in-the-blank. Each of these formats is automatically graded by the LightSail Reader.
When a student signs into their Dashboard, all of their assignments, including their Writing Skill Builder assignment, are shown. Several student-friendly features guide them. A student may choose an automated reading voice and adjust the font type and size to their preference. Their instructions appear in the margin throughout the assessment so that they are always visible. LightSail believes in the power and impact of second chances. Students are given two chances to answer each question correctly. Additionally, they can always view an explanation of why an answer is correct. To increase engagement, an on-screen meter shows them their progress as they work their way through the assignment. Along the way, they earn fun, motivational badges!
A student’s data on a Writing Skill Builder assignment is included on the Totals tab of both the Teacher and Student Dashboards. LightSail believes in the power of data to help children own their educational experience. Their progress and outcomes on these assignments are always provided as a tool to help them understand where they are currently and their growth potential.
Content Builder
Teachers, administrators, and curriculum leaders can import and curate content in any language from websites, Google Docs, PDFs and ePubs.
LightSail’s Content Builder module allows teachers, administrators / curriculum leaders to import content from any website or Word document in any language. Next, educators can customize the imported text by adding standards aligned questions and Thoughts. Educators can either assign the imported text directly to students or to the school library for students to read at their leisure.
Fluency Builder
LightSail’s Fluency Builder tool helps students develop their oral fluency, speaking, and listening skills. Using any text in our platform, teachers can create a Read Aloud assignment. Through this assignment, teachers will gain valuable insight into students’ ability to decode the text, retell the story, and track the student’s Words Correct Per Minute rate. Additional highlights of this feature include:
- • Filter content to use targeted passages for fluency practice
- • Score using a digital Running Record and/or customizable rubrics
- • Add a retelling activity which will be incorporated into students’ final grade
- • Create speaking, listening, and writing activities that include images and/or recordings
- • Model your customized assignment questions using your state’s assessment or international assessments such as TOEFL or IELTS
- • Students can go back and listen to themselves reading aloud the assigned text
- • Provide written or oral feedback for each assignment
- • See, export, and/or print clear and organized result
Fluency Builder assignment recordings archive all year, building a digital portfolio of student progress!
Personalized Reader
Developed to assist struggling readers access LightSail's rich texts. For students with ADHD, Dyslexia, Autism, visual impairment, Cortical Visual Impairment (CVI) or simply a wandering mind and challenges with focusing on dense text.
LightSail’s Personalized Reader includes 60 different tools to customize the eReader and adapt it to each student's needs.
This functionality supports text access for children with ADHD, Dyslexia, Autism, general visual impairments, Cortical Visual Impairment (CVI), or any child who struggles with reading and may have a wandering mind.
Some Feature Highlights:
- • Adjustable viewing window to see 1, 3, or 5 lines of text
- • Ability to change color and adjust the font, background, border, outlines, and more
- • Embedded scaffolds assist the student to focus on just a few words at a time and covering all surrounding words
- • See text light up in ‘karaoke mode’ as the student reads along at their natural pace
- • Listen to the book read aloud using state-of-the art AI; choose from many anthropomorphic voices
- • Enlarge words and track the part of speech and syllables for each word
- • Research-based accommodations for students with Cortical Visual Impairment (CVI), including the Roman Bubble and word streaming for any text
This is the perfect tool to help struggling readers improve their skills, become more confident, and experience the true joy of reading.
Homework
Teachers choose from flexible one-time or repetitive assignments. Teachers will effortlessly track student engagement and completion to increase student accountability.
Teachers can quickly create one-time or repetitive homework assignments. When creating an assignment, teachers decide:
- • Should Cloze assessments be turned off or stay on?
- • Are you requiring a certain number of minutes read per day? If so, how many?
- • Which days of the week am I assigning homework?
- • Would you like to give students the opportunity to choose any book in LightSail? Or would you like to assign a specific book? Or would you like to assign a specific Genre/Topic?
- Word Work
- Spelling Bee
- Vocabulary Assignment
LightSail provides students remediation for their vocabulary words.
Word Work
LightSail’s Word Work feature does precisely what it implies: It helps your students work on vocabulary words they have missed over the course of their reading.
Word Work is designed to prompt your student in multiple ways to review and practice common vocabulary challenges. When a student exits out of or completes a book, they are prompted to retake any missed reading Clozes (fill-in-the-blanks). Through Book Overlays, the History tab, and the Word Work tab, a student can see precisely which assignments require further study. And a teacher can also send their child a reminder to perform Word Work from the Vocabulary tab of their own Dashboard.
With Word Work, you don’t have to worry that your student is senselessly practicing information they have already mastered. It is a tool that gives your students focused practice and additional support targeted specifically to areas they need to work on.
Spelling Bee
Spelling Bee is an easy to use, highly customizable feature that adds tremendous educational value to any book in LightSail. Just like a traditional Spelling Bee, a student is given a series of words to spell. They can listen to the word, see synonyms, its part of speech, and hear it used in a sentence. When they are ready, they type the word and check their work. After the assessment, they are given a score and earn a motivational badge. But the real power of Spelling Bee is the number of ways you can use it in your classroom. The two types of Spelling Bees are those a teacher creates and those compiled and assigned by LightSail.
When a teacher creates their own Spelling Bee, they can choose from words the student spelled incorrectly, words from a specific Lexile™ reading level, words their class struggled with and looked up, or any word they want to add. The second type of Spelling Bee is one generated by LightSail. Once a student finishes a book, LightSail can offer them a Spelling Bee. This assessment contains words from the same Lexile™ range as the book. A teacher can make these Spelling Bees mandatory, offer them only on “Power Texts” (a book within 200 points +/- of a child’s current Lexile™ score), offer them in Free Mode (when a child reads any book of their choosing), or opt to not offer a Spelling Bee at all.
The major advantage of Spelling Bees generated by LightSail is that a teacher knows it is precisely the "Just Right" level of difficulty for that specific learner. A student’s Lexile™ score can be adjusted every 15 days based on their progress, their Spelling Bees are also adjusted. With LightSail’s dynamic ability, customized and differentiated spelling words are tailored to each student.
Vocabulary Assignment
LightSail provides students with books that are at their "Just Right" level. These texts are also embedded with Cloze assessments geared toward helping grow comprehension and word knowledge. These assessment questions are also used to calculate Lexile™ growth. Additionally, LightSail provides a Spelling Bee at the completion of the book.
If a student incorrectly answers a Cloze assessment or Spelling Bee, they have the option to retake it using the Word Work tool. A teacher can also create additional assessments using vocabulary words that their class or individual students are struggling with.
A teacher can choose from a set of questions provided by the platform or create their own questions. They can also use words that were incorrectly answered by their students, words matching a selected Lexile™ level, or they can even add their own words. Questions could ask students to provide a definition using context clues or use the word in a sentence, and many more.
These assessments provide teachers with valuable insight to their students' vocabulary. A teacher can use this to build a vocabulary unit and ensure their students are successful.
Buy Books
Our Available eCommerce Book Store gives you access to over 100k Award Winning Books from the top publishers in the world!
PUBLISHER PARTNERS
You can never have too many books! LightSail has agreements with notable publishers and access to over 100,000 popular and award-winning titles. The possibilities are endless!
The List of Notable Publishers Includes: Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Disney Publishing Worldwide, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Workman, Abrams, Dover, Candlewick, Sourcebooks, Tyndale House, Britannica Educational Publishing, Saddleback Educational Publishing, and many more.