Listenwise: NPR for your classroom

In this post I am going to introduce you to Listenwise - one of my favorite resources I have been using recently! What is it? 3-6 minute long NPR stories, which come with activities for your class! Who doesn't love NPR?!

The first thing I want to flag up, is that the website divides it's stories by '"Current events", "ELA", "Science" and "Social Studies", but in reality there are stories to cover all different subjects and topics, (I searched Design and found lots of relevant stories).

I'm going to show you the lesson for 'Animal Farm' and Satire, along with the teaching resources it provides on both the free account and paid account.

With the free version:

• Listen to the audio
• See the Listening Comprehension Questions
• See the Discussion Themes
• See a link to a Socrative Quiz on this lesson
• Download two listening organizers (A T-Chart and a Language Identification worksheet)
• See related lessons

With the premium version you can also*:

• View an interactive transcript (let's you skip to certain parts)
• Listen to the audio slowed down 20%
• Assign multiple-choice quizzes
• Assign the Listening Comprehension Questions 
• Create online student assignments
• Get further support for ESL
• See the standards it links to (not relevant to us anyway!)

*I very rarely show resources that are not free (I think Extraordinaires is the only other one I've shared). You can use this resource for free, but I recommend the premium version.

What I love:

• The support for ESL students (slowing the audio down, viewing the transcript, tiered vocab lists)
• Seeing that the quizzes are not just about recal - in fact the questions and divided into:
  • Literal
  • Vocabularly
  • Main Idea
  • Inference
  • Point of View
  • Summarize
  • Analyze
  • Evidence
• The teacher dashboard - where you can see students work, as well as students results for an individual quiz, as well as their overall results (so for example, you can see if they are struggling with one of the skills above, like inference).

​Here's a screenshot of their most recent lessons:

I've created a video showing all the features and how easy it is to use. They also have a support section. If you have any additional questions, leave them in the comments.