Your school’s own daily newspaper.
A news portal that carries your school’s name and crest, reads the sources you choose, and publishes nothing until one of your teachers has said yes. Built on the same pipeline that publishes Nook every morning at six.
Everything a school wants to control, in one console.
Nook already does the hard part — reading the world’s news before dawn and throwing away almost all of it. The school edition hands the remaining decisions to you.
Ten minutes a day
The AI writes the whole edition overnight. A teacher reads the queue and approves it — that is the entire daily job.
It becomes your masthead
Your crest, colours and name, on your own address. Students see the school’s paper, not ours.
You choose the sources
Start from our vetted list, switch any of it off, and add your own — including your school’s website.
Teachers drive the AI
Re-level a story for P3 or S5, draft comprehension questions, translate it. Every action makes a draft, never a publication.
Plugins do the classroom work
A quiz from today’s stories, marked automatically. One click, and the AI does every step in between.
Approval is the default
Nothing reaches a student until a member of staff approves it, and the record of who approved what is permanent.
Your stories too
School notices, sports results and student writing sit in the same paper as the world news.
Your bookshelf
The featured book is yours to choose. We never place a publisher’s title into your portal.
Funding, if cost is the barrier
Apply to our funding committee. An approved application waives the setup fee and cuts the annual fee substantially.
Console screens shown throughout are illustrative, using a fictional school.
Ten minutes a day. That is the whole job.
A school newspaper should not become another duty for an already stretched teacher. Nook writes the edition overnight; a member of staff opens a queue, reads it, and approves. On a normal morning that is five to ten minutes — and the console estimates how long it will take before you begin.
Decide once, not every morning
The reason it stays at ten minutes is that every judgement your school makes is stored as a setting, not repeated as a task. You choose your sources once. You write your editorial rules once. You set the reading level for each form once. From then on the AI applies those decisions to every story, every day, and only brings you the result.
You set once
- Which sources you trust
- Your editorial rules and exclusions
- Reading level for each form
- Which sections your school carries
- Who can approve, and who is the backup
- Which plugins run, and when
The AI does every day
- Reads hundreds of stories from your sources
- Rejects anything against your rules
- Drops duplicates and anything published before
- Rewrites each story at your reading levels, in both languages
- Finds and checks a picture for each one
- Lays out the portal, print sheet and assembly slide
- Builds quizzes, vocabulary lists and discussion prompts
- Flags the few items that need a human eye, with the reason
You do each morning
- Open the queue
- Read the handful that were flagged
- Approve — or send one back with a note
A missed morning costs nothing
If nobody approves, nothing publishes and yesterday’s edition stays up. There is no gap to explain and no scramble to fix.
Never one person’s problem
Set a second approver so a sick day, a field trip or a busy week doesn’t stop the paper.
Every setting on one screen
What sources are on, what rules are in force, what each form reads — visible in one place, so you can check the whole configuration in a minute rather than hunting through menus.
Nothing for IT to run
No server, no installation, no updates to schedule. Your IT lead is needed twice during setup and then not at all.
Every AI action produces a draft with a person’s name attached, and a person decides what happens to it. But that decision is asked for once, at the point it matters — not re-asked every morning for the same thing. That is the difference between oversight and data entry.
On day one, it stops looking like our product.
A school edition is not Nook with a logo in the corner. The masthead, the colours, the address and the language are yours, and a student who has never heard of Nook simply reads the school paper.
Your own address
news.yourschool.edu.hk, on your domain. We handle the certificate and the DNS with your IT lead.
Crest, colours, masthead line
Set once in the console, applied everywhere — portal, print sheet, assembly slide and parent email.
English, 繁體中文, or both
Run one language or two. A bilingual school gets two editions, each properly sourced rather than machine-translated.
Works on what you already have
A browser is enough — school iPads, the computer room, a phone at home, or the display outside the staff room.
Delivered as a cloud service
The portal runs as a managed cloud service. There is nothing to install, no server for the school to maintain, and updates arrive without a deployment window. Where a school’s policy calls for something different, there are two alternatives.
Managed cloud, as standard
Hosting, certificates, backups, monitoring and updates are all included in the annual fee. This is how most schools run it, and it is what the pricing on this page covers.
On-premises or your own private cloud
Where policy requires the service to run inside the school’s own environment, it can be deployed there instead. This is quoted separately, since it changes both the build and the ongoing support arrangement.
Cloud partners for data residency
We work in partnership with cloud providers and can host within a specified region, for schools that need to state where data is held without running the infrastructure themselves.
You decide which newsrooms reach your students.
Every school edition starts from the same vetted list Nook uses — public broadcasters, government feeds, children’s news and science publishers. From there it is yours to shape.
Switch any source off
One toggle. If your school would rather not carry a particular outlet, it never appears again.
Add your own
Your school website, a department blog, an alumni feed, or a newsroom we don’t carry. If it publishes a feed, it can be a source.
Order by priority
Decide which sources get looked at first when two cover the same story.
You’re told when a feed dies
Sources go quiet without announcing it. The console flags anything that has stopped publishing, so a section never quietly empties.
Nook already excludes violent crime, war reporting and anything advertising to a child — those stay locked on. Everything else is yours to set: tighten the rules for a younger cohort, exclude a topic during exam season, or re-enable something our public edition leaves out.
A church school, for instance, can turn faith and religious topics back on — the public edition of Nook leaves them out by default, but that is our editorial choice for a general audience, not a restriction we impose on yours.
Tied to your curriculum
Map each section to a Key Learning Area, the forms it is meant for, and a reading band. Teachers then see what belongs in their lesson rather than a general feed.
An AI editor your teachers drive.
The same models that write Nook every morning, put behind a panel a teacher controls. Drag the reading level and the story rewrites itself — try it.
Re-level any story
The same article at P3, P6, S2 or S5 — sentence length, vocabulary and assumed knowledge all move together.
Comprehension questions
A set of questions pitched at the level you chose, ready to edit before you hand them out.
Vocabulary lists
The words in the story that are likely new at this level, with child-facing definitions.
Translation
Move a story between English and 繁體中文, keeping the reading level you set.
Discussion prompts
Three or four open questions for a form period or a morning circle.
Assembly version
The same story cut to three sentences and formatted for the hall screen.
Every AI action in the console produces a draft with a teacher’s name attached to it. Nothing an AI writes reaches a student without a person having read it first — that is not a setting, it is how the console is built.
One click, and the AI does every step.
Plugins turn the morning’s edition into classroom material. Choose one, click once, and it is built from today’s stories — questions written, answers marked, results grouped by class. Nothing to prepare the night before.
News quiz
Questions from today’s stories, at the level you choose, marked automatically.
Vocabulary builder
The words likely to be new at this level, with child-facing definitions.
Discussion cards
Three open questions for a form period or a morning circle.
Assembly pack
Three headlines cut to three sentences and formatted for the hall screen.
Reading challenge
A termly reading scheme with class leaderboards — class-level, never per child.
Printable worksheet
A single sheet built from any story, ready for the photocopier.
Debate motions
A motion drawn from the week’s news, with points for both sides.
Parent digest
What the class read this week, and one question to ask at dinner.
The news quiz
Pick one story or the whole edition. The quiz is written at the reading level of the form you choose, marked automatically as students submit, and the results come back grouped by class — including which question the class found hardest, which is usually the more useful number.
How they behave
Run it, or schedule it
Some plugins make sense on demand; others should just happen. The assembly pack can build itself at 07:40 every morning and the parent digest can go out every Friday, without anyone remembering.
Everything is a draft first
A plugin never sends anything to a student by itself. You see what it produced, edit any part of it, and decide — the same rule as the news.
No per-use charge
Plugins are included in the annual fee. Run the quiz every day for every form if you want to; the price does not move.
New ones just appear
As we build more, they show up in your console. There is nothing to install and no version for your IT lead to manage.
Nothing publishes because a machine thought it was fine.
Tomorrow’s edition arrives in a queue overnight. Someone on your staff opens it, reads it, and decides. Until they do, students see yesterday’s paper.
Approval required, and lockable
On by default, and an administrator can lock it so no one can turn it off later.
Approve, send back, or reject
Send back returns it to the editor with a note. Reject records a reason, which becomes part of the trail.
A permanent audit trail
Who approved what, when, and what they changed — kept for the life of the account, and exportable.
Take anything down instantly
One click removes a story from the portal. It disappears from the site but stays in the record.
A route for students and parents
Anyone reading can report a story. Reports land in your console, not ours.
No advertising, ever
There is no ad slot to sell, in the public edition or yours. It is not a plan we could change later.
The world’s news, and your school’s, in one paper.
A school paper that only carries other people’s news is missing the point. Sports day, the choir competition, and a piece written by 5A belong on the same front page as the typhoon.
School notices and events
Written in the console, scheduled to a date range, and laid out exactly like every other story.
Student writing
Students submit; a teacher reviews before anything appears. Bylines can go to a class rather than a named child.
Your own sections
Add a section the public edition doesn’t have — house news, a reading corner, a languages column.
Your bookshelf, chosen by you
The featured book on a school portal is entirely the school’s. Put your library’s new arrivals there, the reading-scheme title for the term, or a book a class chose themselves. Schedule them ahead for the whole year if you like.
To be explicit about the difference: in the public edition of Nook we work with publishers and authors on the featured-book slot. That arrangement stops at your door. No publisher can buy a place in your school’s portal — the titles are yours, and only yours.
Roles that match how a school actually works.
Four roles, because a school has four kinds of people using this — not because a permissions matrix looked tidy.
Administrator
Owns the account. Sets branding, sources, editorial rules, and who else gets in. Usually the IT lead.
Editor
Runs the paper day to day: approves the queue, uses the AI editor, publishes campus stories. Usually one or two teachers.
Teacher
Reads everything, drafts and submits, reviews student writing for their own classes. Cannot publish alone.
Student
Reads, bookmarks, and submits writing. Sees only what has been approved.
Sign in with the account they have
Google Workspace for Education or Microsoft 365. No new passwords for 800 children to forget.
Import a class list
A CSV of students and forms is enough to get the whole school in. Class codes work where accounts don’t.
Leavers are handled
Roll classes up at the start of the year; accounts that leave the school lose access on the date you set.
See how a class reads. Not how a child reads.
You get what a reading coordinator actually needs — which forms are engaged, which sections land, whether the reading month worked — without turning a newspaper into surveillance.
Class and form aggregates
Average minutes, participation rates, and the sections a year group actually opens.
Export for your own reporting
CSV out, so the figures can go into a reading-scheme review or a board paper.
No profile of any child
Nook does not build a per-student behaviour profile, does not sell this data, and shares it with no one.
A school edition holds the minimum: a name, a class, and what has been read at an aggregate level. It is processed in line with the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance, and the school remains the data user — we process it on your instructions and hand it back or delete it when you ask.
From signature to first edition in about five weeks.
The customisation fee buys a project, not a login. Here is what those weeks actually look like.
- 1Week 0
Scoping workshop
Half a day with your team: which sections, which sources, which forms, what your editorial line should be, and who will operate it.
- 2Week 1–2
We build your edition
Branding, domain and certificate, source list, editorial rules, curriculum mapping and roles — configured with you, not handed over as a blank console.
- 3Week 3
Operator training
Two sessions for the staff who will run it, plus a written user guide in English and 繁體中文, and a recording to give anyone who joins later.
- 4Week 4
Pilot with one form
One year group reads it for a week. We review the queue alongside your editors and refine the setup in light of that first full week.
- 5Week 5
Whole-school launch
Accounts imported, distribution turned on, and the first full edition goes out under your masthead.
After launch
Term-time support
A named contact, answering during school hours in Hong Kong.
A termly review
We go through what published, what got rejected and why, and adjust the rules with you.
Updates included
Improvements to the pipeline and the console reach your edition at no extra cost.
Two numbers, and no surprises.
A one-off customisation fee to build your edition, then an annual maintenance fee based on how many people use it. Users means students plus the staff who operate it.
Indicative only. Final quotations depend on how much customisation your school asks for.
Included
- ✓Scoping workshop and the whole build
- ✓Your domain, certificate and branding
- ✓Source configuration and your editorial rules
- ✓Curriculum mapping and reading bands
- ✓The AI editor, with no per-story charge
- ✓Every plugin, with no per-use charge
- ✓Approval workflow and audit trail
- ✓Two operator training sessions and the recording
- ✓A written user guide in both languages
- ✓Term-time support and a termly review
- ✓All platform updates
Quoted separately
- +On-premises or private-cloud deployment
- +Integration with your student information system
- +On-site training beyond the two included sessions
- +Languages other than English and 繁體中文
- +A second portal for a sister school or campus
Want a written quotation?
Tell us roughly how many students, which forms, and when you would want to launch. We will come back with a proper proposal and a reference you can talk to.
Most schools should not pay the list price.
Cost should not be what decides whether a school can do this. Where it is a barrier, schools are welcome to apply to our funding programme: an approved application waives the setup fee outright and reduces the annual per-user fee substantially.
The setup fee, waived in full
All HK$20,000 of it. You still get the scoping workshop, the build, the branding, the training and the written guide — nothing is stripped out of the engagement to pay for the discount.
A substantially reduced annual fee
The committee sets the reduction case by case, at a level the school can sustain year after year rather than a first-year discount that lapses.
Assessed by a committee
Applications are assessed by our funding committee against the same criteria for every school. The decision rests with the committee and is given to you in writing.
Identical product, no lesser tier
A funded school gets the same portal, the same AI editor, the same plugins and the same support as a school paying in full. There is no cut-down edition.
What the committee weighs
There is no means test and no request for accounts. The committee looks at reach and readiness: how many students this would serve, and whether the school is set up to run it well.
- ✓The school’s funding position, described in your own words
- ✓How many students it would reach, and which forms
- ✓Whether someone is named to operate it — one committed teacher counts for more than the size of the school
- ✓Whether the school is able to work closely with us through the first year
- ✓Whether the school is open to sharing its experience with others in the sector
How to apply
- 1
Send a short note
The school, rough student numbers, which forms, and why cost is a barrier. A few sentences is enough; there is no need for a formal proposal.
- 2
We send a one-page application
A single page. We also send a written quotation at list price, since most schools need one for their records in any case.
- 3
The committee decides
The outcome comes to you in writing, with the reasoning, and the exact figures where it is approved.
- 4
The decision remains yours
An approved application is an offer, not a commitment. Applying costs nothing and obliges you to nothing.
A clear answer, either way
Approval is a considered decision and it can go either way. The outcome comes to you in writing, with the reasoning behind it. Where the committee is unable to approve an application, we say so directly — and a standard quotation remains available if the school still wishes to proceed.
Public funding your school may already hold
Separate from our own programme, Hong Kong schools hold several government grants that can, depending on each scheme’s own rules, be applied to a platform like this. We are not your funding adviser and we do not decide what your school is eligible for — but we know what these applications need, and we will prepare our side of the paperwork.
Composite Information Technology Grant
資訊科技綜合津貼Best fit✓ VerifiedThe Education Bureau’s published ambit for this grant covers “annual subscription/renewal fees for licences & software, and other charges for on-line learning resources”. It is recurrent, it arrives automatically, and there is no application — the school decides how to allocate it.
It is the same grant that pays for Wi-Fi, antivirus and device replacement, so for most schools this is a question of priority rather than permission.
edb.gov.hk ↗Expanded Operating Expenses Block Grant
擴大的營辦開支整筆津貼Backup✓ VerifiedThe IT grant above sits inside this block grant, which aided schools with an IMC may deploy flexibly for purposes related to teaching, learning and school operation. Where the IT grant is already committed, the same spend can often sit here instead.
Subject to your own IMC’s oversight — and the Bureau is adjusting block grant rates for 2026/27, so schools are tighter than they were.
edb.gov.hk ↗Promotion of Reading Grant
推廣閱讀津貼Partial only✓ VerifiedStill in force. The Bureau lists “subscriptions to web-based reading schemes” and “online reading platforms” among acceptable uses, and asks schools to act as professional gatekeepers on quality — which is precisely what the approval workflow is for.
For most primary schools this grant totals HK$22,000–44,000 and already funds printed books, so in practice it can part-fund a reading-framed licence rather than cover one in full.
edb.gov.hk ↗Researched 13 August 2026 against official Education Bureau and QEF sources, and quoted rather than paraphrased. Grant rates and circulars are reissued annually — check the version in force on the day you apply.
Two schemes that are not a route in
The Quality Education Fund
QEF supports one-off, innovative, school-based projects, and a standing annual licence falls outside what it funds. An application is also weakened where the same spend could be met from the IT grant. A QEF project built around how a school uses the platform is a different proposition, and one we are glad to support.
The AI for Empowering Learning and Teaching programme
This HK$500,000 one-off programme closed to applications on 28 February 2026, and the Education Bureau reported in June 2026 that all eligible schools had applied and been approved. A school still holding unspent funds through to August 2028 may be able to allocate part of it, subject to the programme’s own conditions.
What your procurement file will need
Aided schools follow the Bureau’s procurement guidelines, and at this price band that means quotations rather than a full tender. The points worth knowing before you begin:
Quotations, not a tender
Setup plus a first year (about HK$58,700) and a three-year contract (about HK$136,100) both sit in the five-written-quotations band. A full tender only starts above HK$200,000.
Specify in functional terms
A specification should describe what you need — bilingual daily news for these forms, teacher re-levelling, quiz generation, an approval workflow — rather than name a supplier. We prepare our documentation in that form.
Never split the invoice
Billing setup in one month and licences the next, to stay under a threshold, is exactly what the anti-splitting rule forbids. We quote the whole engagement on one document.
Allow three weeks
A written quotation exercise runs at least three weeks from issue to close, and invitations go by registered mail. Worth building into the timeline if you want to launch at the start of a term.
What we will do for an application
- ✓A written quotation in the format your procurement process needs
- ✓A full written specification of what is supplied
- ✓Supporting material for an application: what it does, who it reaches, how it is assessed
- ✓A named contact your school can quote as the supplier
⚠ Please confirm eligibility with the Education Bureau and through your school’s own procedures before relying on any scheme. Rules are revised periodically, and the version in force on the day you apply is the one that governs.
The things schools ask first.
Do we need our own IT resource to run this?
Not to run it — a teacher operates the console. Your IT lead is needed twice: once to point the subdomain at us during setup, and once to connect Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 for sign-in. After that it is a teacher’s tool.
How much teacher time does it actually take?
Five to ten minutes on a normal morning. The AI writes the edition overnight and flags only the few items that need a person, with the reason; the console estimates the review time before you open it. Most schools give it to one editor with a second as backup. If nobody approves, yesterday’s edition simply stays up — it never publishes by default.
Do the plugins cost extra?
No. Every plugin is included in the annual fee with no per-use charge — run the quiz for every form every day if you want to, and the price does not move. New plugins appear in your console as we build them, with nothing to install.
Can we use government funding to pay for this?
Possibly. Several Hong Kong grants can cover this kind of spend — the Composite Information Technology Grant, for instance, explicitly covers annual subscription and licence fees for online learning resources. Whether your school can use a particular grant is for the EDB and your own procedures to settle, not for us to promise. We will supply the quotation, specification and supporting material an application needs. Separately, we run our own funding programme, and an approved application waives the setup fee entirely.
What if we disagree with a story that got through?
Take it down in one click; it disappears from the portal immediately. Then tell the console why, and the rule you add stops the same kind of story reaching the queue again.
Can we host it on our own servers?
Yes. The standard service is cloud-hosted and managed by us, which is what most schools choose. Where policy requires it to run on the school’s own infrastructure or in its own private cloud, it can be deployed there and is quoted separately, since that changes the build and the ongoing support. Where the requirement is about where data is held rather than who runs the servers, we also work with cloud partners who can host within a specified region.
Where is our data held, and who owns it?
The school is the data user and we process on your instructions, in line with the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance. Your content and your lists are exportable at any time, and deleted on request when the agreement ends.
Can we promote our own library’s books?
Yes — the featured book on your portal is chosen entirely by you, scheduled as far ahead as you like. No publisher can buy that slot in a school edition.
What happens after the first year?
Only the annual maintenance fee continues; the customisation fee is not charged again. If your student numbers change, the annual fee follows them at the next renewal.
Start with a conversation, not a contract.
A half-hour call is usually enough to work out whether this fits your school. If it doesn’t, we will say so.