Dive Brief:

• K-12 digital literacy platform LightSail on Wednesday announced updates to its adaptive learning tools, as well as another new round of funding. 
• The startup's latest funding round, led by Intuit co-founder Scott Cook, raised $3.5 million. 
• Among the updates are new rewards and motivations aimed at incentivizing learning, as well as additional scaffolds for users who are below benchmarks.  

Dive Insight:

LightSail's digital library, which has over 80,000 digital texts, comes with embedded "check for understanding" inquiries and assessment questions. The idea of students answering built-in questions as they read is critical, providing a better measure of reading comprehension skills. As we've said before, LightSail and other digital literacy platforms aim to make the lives of educators, students, and parents easier by having texts (and questions) all accessible from one location: a tablet.