AverPoint

AverPoint helps students improve their reading, writing, and critical thinking.

We turn media literacy into a dynamic, daily practice on real websites. Through daily practice, you can develop the skills, knowledge, and personal drive to apply media literacy in the real world.

Our most popular product is the News Challenge. Every Sunday, we send you reading and critical thinking goals. Our extension measures your progress. If you meet your goals, you go up a level the next week. If you miss your goals, you go down a level.

Over time, we help you improve your reading diet: the range of sources, topics, and geographies you read about. We also help you improve your critical thinking through two features. We add a credibility layer on top of text, allowing you to question, review, save, and add evidence to claims in real newspapers. We also show you a quiz at the end of the article that tests your comprehension, library science, and metacognition.

Our 2nd most popular product is Classroom. This integrated reading, research, and writing platform enhances existing courses. You can use it with any text: newspapers, academic papers, literature, etc. Our extension measures your reading progress, and lets you interact with claims. After you save claims, you can organize them in our web app. You can then add this text as footnotes or block quotes in AverPoint Writer, our writing editor.

We’ve also recently introduced a third product, Words. This vocabulary builder helps you naturally learn over 1,000 words that appear on standardized tests like the SATs. When you are reading for pleasure or for class, Words will highlight the words you should master. You can see flashcards, take quizzes, and keep track of your word lists over time.

We designed our browser extension to help you develop your cognitive media literacy. This approach to media literacy goes beyond footnotes and sources, and helps students build autonomy over two things:

1. The media they consume and
2. the meaning they make from media messages.

In a free republic, it's crucial each person has the skills, knowledge, and personal drive to maintain this autonomy.