LightSail is an e-reading adaptive literacy platform that helps teachers support their students’ independent reading. Students can use LightSail to check out texts from their schools’ digital library and read the books directly on their devices. The library of 6,000 texts can be expanded in a couple of ways. First, teachers can purchase books from a store. Second, teachers can upload their own texts in a variety of formats (including ePub, Google Docs, and PDF) and create their own books and assignments with the Content Builder tool. As students progress through a book, questions appear to gauge their comprehension, from simple multiple-choice Cloze-style questions to longer narrative responses. As students complete these assessments, they earn badges and also earn a Lexile measure, an evaluation of their current reading level based on their answers to the reading comprehension questions and the difficulty of the particular book. The Lexile measure is updated in real time with each assessment. Students always have access to their own data on the student home screen, which displays their per-page reading progress, their earned badges from completed tasks, and their Lexile score. Teachers can also view students’ data in real time and post to a class-wide leaderboard to celebrate student successes and milestones.
