News - Media Literacy
ClassroomScreen The Swiss Army Knife for the classroom . Click on Learn more for tutorial
- Language – Choose to display text in a large range of languages-Random Name/Dice – Enter the names of students and choose one at random. -Sound Level – Monitor classroom noise levels using the microphone on your device.-QR Code – Enter a link and a QR code is automatically generated.- Drawing – There are two sizes available where you can free draw.- Text – A simple tool to write instructions, reminders, learning goals and so on.- Work Symbols – Display one of four options: work together, ask a neighbor, whisper, and silence.- Traffic Light – Display a red, amber, or green light to provide a visual reminder of when to move around, begin a task, pack up etc.- Timer – Count up or count down, record “laps”, and more. You can customise the tone that rings when the time is up.-Clock – Shows the time as a 12 or 24 hour clock. Also shows a calendar.
Article A shocking number of young people can't separate fact from fiction online The Hechinger Report
The overwhelming majority of young people are unable to sift through online information and separate fact, fiction and opinion, according to a new study from Stanford University. Among the hair-raising findings: 93 percent of college students tested were unable to flag a lobbyist's website as a biased source of information. Younger students fared poorly, too. READ MORE
Article Media Literacy: Don't Go Down the Rabbit Hole
Article: Media Literacy Classes Am To Home Student Truth Detectors
Article N.J. Introduces Media Literacy in Schools
Media Literacy Resources
Read: How to Read the News Like a Fact Checker
Watch: Defining Confirmation Bias – reporters and media professionals define “confirmation bias” and discuss its effect on how people approach and evaluate news and other information.
Explore: Where Do We Get Our News and Why Does It Matter, a mini-lesson that provides helpful tools to address media bias and develop constructive news habits.
Critical Media Project is a free site with lots of materials that kids will find relevant. It encourages kids to examine issues related to culture and identity with the use of media clips.
5 Questions to Ask Kids About Media (guide and handout) to help them develop critical thinking skills around the media they consume.
Teaching About Fake News
News Evaluator website is a new interactive designed to help students develop information literacy skills.
Civic Online Reasoning, Here’s how they describe themselves. Students are confused about how to evaluate online information. We all are. The new Civic Online Reasoning (COR) curriculum, developed by the Stanford History Education Group, provides free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world. Article
Interactive Digital Future Guide
What do you see when you imagine the year 2050? What will the world look like? Where might we live? How will we feed ourselves? How do we care for a future that we can’t even imagine? Your Future Guide—a first-of-its-kind digital museum interactive combining technology with storytelling—invites you on a tour of the year 2050.
Bring Current Events Into Your Classroom: Above the Noise Collection Cut through the hype surrounding controversial topics in the news to find out what's really going on. Find resources for starting conversations and creating a safe place for middle and high school students to investigate controversial topics and share their voices.
21 Sites For Short & Accessible Video “Explainers” About Current Events
The Week in Pictures displays a small collection of photographs from around the world. The pictures capture a mix of serious news stories and lighter cultural stories. The Week in Pictures collections are part of a much larger resource from the BBC simply called In Pictures. The In Pictures resource provides hundreds of images in a variety collections and slideshows about current events throughout the world. Some of the slide shows even include narration. All of the images include captions explaining what is happening in the picture and a little background knowledge about the event being photographed.www.freetech4teachers.com
Facts and Opinions Explained by Common Craft uses examples of print journalists and television commentators to help viewers understand why it is important to fact-check when they hear or read something that is presented as fact. www.freetech4teachers.com
Connect Extend Challenge is a thinking routine that helps kids make connections between new ideas and content to what they already know and to what makes sense to them. So it’s a perfect way for your students to begin thinking about primary sources and how they can be applied to your direct instruction, a video clip, a piece of literature, or something they learned last year. Site includes template
AllSides, News articles about current events are shared from a variety of sources, which are identified, based on a study, as “from the center,” “from the right,” or “from the left.” It’s a great way to compare and discuss the differences in reporting. The site also offers media bias ratings for more than 800 sources. AllSides helps students get all sides of a story or issue to sort fact from fiction and identify bias and misinformation. It offers perspectives from center-, left-, and right-leaning publications to help students compare and contrast.
Comparing Mass Media Reports of the News According to the news platform Newscompare, just 41 percent of Americans believe the mass media report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.” Even fewer Americans who are politically involved believe what they see on television, read in newspapers, or hear on radio. Newscompare is trying to change that. This one-of-a-kind, free news platform takes snapshots of major media outlets every hour and lines them up side-by-side, making it easy to teach media literacy. The media reports are also searchable by date and time.
WSJ Explainers are short and relatively accessible videos on current events.
“THE NEWS EVALUATOR” IS A NEW INTERACTIVE DESIGNED TO HELP TEACH INFORMATION LITERACY
✅What The Fact is a series of videos created by Newsy in partnership with PolitiFact. They analyze if claims made by figures in current events are true or not.
Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world. by Joyce Valenza in the School Library Journal
Visual to Help you Teach Students
Article: Teachers leverage students' interest in current events to build higher-level reading and writing skills
Help Students Fight Misinformation Around the Capitol Insurrection (KGED)
Lessons and Kits (Project Look Smart)
Teen Fact-Checking Network—part of the MediaWise Project puts together videos debunking false claims, half-truths and fantasy.
Teaching While White about the anxiety white teachers often feel while trying to teach about those difficult topics, especially to students of color.
Analyzing Propaganda Techniques Used to Disrupt Democracy Worldwide PBS affiliate WETA has made available a list of propaganda techniques that make false connections (such as the techniques of “transfer” and “testimonial”), or constitute special appeals (such as “bandwagon” and “fear”), or are types of logical fallacy (for example, “unwarranted extrapolation”). The list, which provides definitions and examples, is adapted from Propaganda Critic, a website dedicated to promoting techniques of propaganda analysis among critically minded citizens.
Discussing Propaganda Techniques in Online Political AdsIn this ReadWriteThink lesson, students read or view a literary text, and then identify and discuss examples of propaganda techniques in the text. Students then explore the use of propaganda in popular culture by looking at examples in the media.
Exploring Propaganda in the Digital AgeThe Mind Over Media web platform gives students aged 13 and up an opportunity to explore the subject of contemporary propaganda by hosting thousands of examples of 21st-century propaganda from around the world. Users can upload, examine, and discuss examples of propaganda from their daily lives.
Civic Online Reasoning is a free resource from the Stanford History Education Group. Currently, Civic Online Reasoning offers twenty activity plans that you can download and or access as Google Docs when you register for a free account on the Stanford History Education Group's website. The activities include templates for building lessons on evaluating social media claims, evaluating a website's reliability, researching claims made on social media (and other places), and comparing evidence from multiple sites www.freetech4teachers.com
Digital Citizenship Curriculum (by Common Sense Education): Free K-12 lessons on news and media literacy.
Resources For Fighting Islamophobia In School
Learning for Justice Educate children and youth to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to educators—teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioner,. to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants. The program emphasizes social justice and anti-bias. It has a resources called “Moment.” Every weekly moment (they have an impressive archive) “contains critical materials to address what’s happening in the classroom – and the culture – right now. ”
RealClearPolitics is a political news and polling data aggregator. The site's founders say their goal is to give readers "ideological diversity". Politico Executive Editor Jim VandeHei has called the site "an essential stop for anyone interested in politics."RealClearPolitics is a political news and polling data aggregator that also enables people to fact . check the news stories. The site's founders say their goal is to give readers "ideological diversity". Politico Executive Editor Jim VandeHei has called the site "an essential stop for anyone interested in politics."
The Sift (by the News Literacy Project): A weekly newsletter digest of trending stories and fact checks, focusing on viral memes and social media posts. Each newsletter also ends with tips on incorporating the content into classrooms.
Snopes“When misinformation obscures the truth and readers don’t know what to trust, Snopes’ fact-checking and original, investigative reporting lights the way to evidence-based and contextualized analysis. We always link to and document our sources so readers are empowered to do independent research and make up their own minds.”
PolitiFact“Fact-checking journalism is the heart of PolitiFact. Our core principles are independence, transparency, fairness, thorough reporting and clear writing. The reason we publish is to give citizens the information they need to govern themselves in a democracy.”
Factcheck.org “We re a nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship and to increase public knowledge and understanding.”
AllSides“AllSides™ is a media solutions company that strengthens our democratic society with balanced news, media bias ratings, diverse perspectives, and real conversation. We expose people to information and ideas from all sides of the political spectrum so they can better understand the world — and each other.”
Google Fact Check Explorer“This tool allows you to easily browse and search for fact checks. For example, you can search for a politician’s statement, or for a topic. You can also restrict results to a specific publisher. You can search by keywords and see a list of matching claims and the corresponding fact checks. Keywords can be anything from specific topics to full politician quotes. Basically anything you would also put into the regular Google Search bar.
Analyzing How Words Communicate Bias (Teaching Tolerance): Get students to analyze the tone, word choice, and messaging of newscasts, paying particular attention to biased language.
Challenging Confirmation Bias Bias can cloud our critical thinking, so this lesson gets students recognizing their own biases and working with and against them.
Article: Teaching Current Events in the Age of Social Media
Article: Two States. Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories. is a new New York Times interactive comparing textbooks used in California and in Texas, and how they talk about the same topics.
The overwhelming majority of young people are unable to sift through online information and separate fact, fiction and opinion, according to a new study from Stanford University. Among the hair-raising findings: 93 percent of college students tested were unable to flag a lobbyist's website as a biased source of information. Younger students fared poorly, too. READ MORE
Article Media Literacy: Don't Go Down the Rabbit Hole
Article: Media Literacy Classes Am To Home Student Truth Detectors
Article N.J. Introduces Media Literacy in Schools
Media Literacy Resources
- Harm & Distrust This lesson gives your students the opportunity to grapple with this complex topic by assigning Harm & Distrust,was created byCheckologyHosted by Natalie Moore, a reporter who covers segregation and inequality for WBEZ in Chicago, “Harm & Distrust” explores how mainstream news organizations have failed to represent all communities accurately and equitably, and what some legacy media outlets are doing to address these failures today.
- Elementary Resources This list of resources design specifically for K-5 educators, librarians, and community practitioners provides a sampling of past events that have been created by previous MLW participants as well as a list of age-appropriate media literacy resources from leading educational organizations like Common Sense, PBS Learning Media, and Scholastic.
- Middle School Resources This list of resources design specifically for educators, librarians, and community practitioners serving grades 6-8 provides a sampling of past events and activities that have been held by previous MLW participants as well as a list of age-appropriate media literacy resources from leading educational organizations like PBS Learning Media, KQED, and NewseumED.
- High School Resources This list of resources design specifically for high school educators, librarians, and community practitioners provides a sampling of past events that have been created by previous MLW participants as well as a list of age-appropriate media literacy resources from leading educational organizations like NewseumED, PBS Learning Media, and Project Look Sharp.
- Lessons for Your Classroom: News and Media Literacy
This collection – which includes videos, blog articles, student handouts, lesson plans, and tip sheets – will help your students learn to effectively identify, analyze, and investigate the news and information they receive from online sources. - Higher Ed Resources This list of resources, design specifically for educators, librarians, and community practitioners in the higher education setting, provides a sampling of past events that have been created by previous MLW participants as well as a list of age-appropriate media literacy resources from leading educational organizations like NAMLE, Media Smarts, and Project Look Sharp.
- Thinkalong a free project of Connecticut Public Radio and Television designed to promote medial literacy and critical thinking, and has all the resources you need for lessons that promote both.Here is how they describe themselves: Thinkalong is a learning tool designed for middle school students to build critical thinking, media literacy and debate skills. Thinkalong asks students to put social issues under a microscope by evaluating sources, considering multiple sides of an argument, and engaging in respectful dialogue.
- Comparing Mass Media Reports of the NewsAccording to the news platform Newscompare, just 41 percent of Americans believe the mass media report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.” Even fewer Americans who are politically involved believe what they see on television, read in newspapers, or hear on radio. Newscompare is trying to change that. This one-of-a-kind, free news platform takes snapshots of major media outlets every hour and lines them up side-by-side, making it easy to teach media literacy. The media reports are also searchable by date and time.
- Media Literacy Resources (Newseum)
- Digital Citizenship Curriculum (by Common Sense Education): Free K-12 lessons on news and media literacy.
Read: How to Read the News Like a Fact Checker
Watch: Defining Confirmation Bias – reporters and media professionals define “confirmation bias” and discuss its effect on how people approach and evaluate news and other information.
Explore: Where Do We Get Our News and Why Does It Matter, a mini-lesson that provides helpful tools to address media bias and develop constructive news habits.
Critical Media Project is a free site with lots of materials that kids will find relevant. It encourages kids to examine issues related to culture and identity with the use of media clips.
5 Questions to Ask Kids About Media (guide and handout) to help them develop critical thinking skills around the media they consume.
Teaching About Fake News
- 7 websites to teach fake news
- Fake News Game
- Fake Or Real? How To Self-Check The News And Get The Facts
Fact-checking sites are a useful tool, but students can also learn to apply the principles of fact checking on their own. Students will learn how to assess and analyze the credibility of any online article or website. Ideal as a preliminary to undertaking a research project. - Fake It To Make It is an online game about fake news
- Snopes
Snopes is flat-out fun, featuring wacky articles about the 8-foot tall woman, cannibalism, and Halloween candy. But underneath the sometimes-amusing subject matter are real fact checkers who investigate the claims, uncover evidence, and present conclusions. And it’s not only outlandish stories, but also any news-worthy topic, including politics, culture and global events. Snopes calls itself the oldest and largest fact-checking site online. Is it true? I haven’t fact-checked that claim, but I know your students will love Snopes. - Cranky Uncle is a not-very-splashy, but effective, information literacy game that you can play in a browser or download as an app. Players learn various common strategies that can be used to manipulate consumers of news.
- Open Secrets Open Secrets isn’t the usual fact-checking site. Rather, it’s dedicated to tracking, documenting, and revealing the sources of money in American politics and the effect on elections and policy. The site’s research tools include national and local donor lookup as well as selected datasets about campaigns and donors. Great for PBL and advanced students.
- BBC New Reality Check The highly respected British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) takes a wide-ranging look at trends, rumors, global events, and disputed or controversial news stories. Students can dive into the careful analysis and draw their own conclusions.
- Factitious Use this site to test your Fake News detection skills!
- Tool for Parsing Fact from Fiction
The nonpartisan, nonprofit News Literacy Project (NLP) has launched a tool for teachers to help them fight disinformation and strengthen news literacy. The tool is aimed in part at highlighting the importance of the First Amendment and value of the free press. - “HARMONY SQUARE” IS AN ONLINE GAME DESIGNED TO TEACH TEENS ABOUT DISINFORMATION
- middle school lesson plan aligned to NGSS standards. Students explore the characteristics of science and pseudoscience.MERLOT Fake News “bookmark” collection
- Fake News Wakelet a list of helpful resources that can help you design and deliver fake news and bias lessons.
- This One Weird Trick Will Help You Spot Clickbait is another TED-Ed video that teaches viewers how headlines are created to entice readers to click on an article. The video also explains how a small kernel of truth or a small and inconclusive study will be manipulated to create an article and a clickbait headline. www.freetech4teachers.com
- Dollar Street, a project created by Gapminder, sent teams of photographers around the world to take photos of over 264 homes in 50 different countries and uploaded them onto the website, allowing us to see how different people live across the world at different income points. The project imagines the world as a street ordered by income…poor families live at one end and rich families live at the other. A team of photographers went out and photographed the everyday items owned by families of all income levels — shoes, toothbrushes, TVs, beds, lights, sinks — so that visitors to the site can see how much income affects how families live.
- Trusted News for Google Chrome. It claims that they are “your first step in the fight against fake news. Trusted News uses independent, transparent, and neutral sources to assess news sites. We aim to help you cast a more critical eye over the news by rating for fake, questionable or trustworthy news. Using a simple notification system, the extension flags the trustworthiness of the site. Check at-a-glance if a site is reputable or not. Trusted News also highlights satirical and user-generated content. The extension puts an icon in your browser that changes color and shape depending on what site you’re visiting. A green check? Trustworthy. Red exclamation mark? Not trustworthy. It also marks sites as biased, satire, clickbait, and malicious.
- Visual featuring some interesting tips to help you spot fake news.
- Video: “Truth or Fake 2019: Four tips for detecting fake news online”
- How to Detect Fake News
- KQED has a nice article with a lesson plan and resources at The Honest Truth about Fake News . . . and How Not to Fall for It.
- How Fake News is Fooling Millions
- Article Leonard Pitts article on fake news suggested that fake news should “not to be confused with satirical news as seen on shows like ‘Saturday Night Live’ and ‘Last Week Tonight.’ Fake news is not a humorous comment on the news. Rather, fake news seeks to supplant the news, to sway its audience into believing all sorts of untruths and conspiracy theories, the more bizarre, the better.”
- The News Hour is an online game from NATO (yes, NATO) “designed to help readers identify online misinformation.” Unfortunately, you can only play it if you are logged-on to Facebook, which makes it problematic to use with students at school. You can read more about it at this Forbes article, NATO’s Latest Weapon: A Facebook Game For Fake News Countering.
- Video How Fake News Played A Part on the 2016 Election
- Article: Fake News vs. Real News: Determining the Reliability of Sources
- Article: Fake News: Why We Fall For It Psychology Today Implicit and conformation bias research
- Stephen Colbert 2005, on Fake News
- How false news can spread powerful video
- Should We Stop Saying "Fake News"? (file will download to your device)
- PBS New Hour"To Fix Fake News Look to Yellow Journalism"
In this short (4-minute) audio NPR report, you can listen to Sam Wineburg discuss the findings of the study and suggest how teachers and librarians need to proceed in teaching the skills of news literacy: https://www.npr.org/player/embed/503129818/503141179 - PBS NewsHour Extra: Did Fake News Influence the Outcome of Election 2016?
- Video: “Deepfake Videos Are Getting Real and That’s a Problem”
- Factitious Use this site to test your Fake News detection skills!
- Fact Checking for Fake News (pdf) Google Docs
- Fact-Checking Your Writing: Tips & Helpful Websites Includes salient concise information in an engaging format. Best Website suggestions.
- SEEING ISN’T BELIEVING: The Fact Checker’s guide to manipulated video impressive – Washington Post interactive.
- Google’s Fact Check Explorer lets you search different topics you have questions about. This tool collects more than 150,000 fact checks from reputable publishers from around the world. | Google also created a site with fact-checking resources.
- Common Sense Media: Turn Students into Fact-Finding Web Detectives
- Channel One News: Lesson Plan: How to Spot Fake News
- The News Literacy Project: Ten Questions For Fake News Detection
- EasyBib: Identifying Fake News: An Infographic and Educator Resources
- EasyBib: How Savvy are Your Students?: 7 Fake Websites to Really Test Their Evaluation Skills
- Your Logical Fallacy Is. It is a website that provides short explanations and examples of twenty-four common logical fallacies. Visitors to the site can click through the gallery to read the examples. Your Logical Fallacy Is also provides free PDF poster files that you can download and print. www.freetech4teachers.com
- How to Explain Disinformation
- Your Bias Is. Your Bias Is provides an interactive guide to understanding 24 cognitive biases and how those biases affect how we interpret information that we find. Your Bias Is also offers free PDF poster files that you can download and print. www.freetech4teachers.com
- The Guide to Common Fallacies is a series of videos produced by the PBS Ideas channel. Each video covers a different common fallacy. Included in the series are lessons about Strawman, Ad Hominem, Black and White, Authority fallacies.
- Wireless Philosophy offers 35 videos that explain various logical fallacies and how they are employed by authors and public speakers.www.freetech4teachers.com
- Why People Fall for Misinformation is a good TED-Ed lesson about critical thinking. The video does a nice job of helping viewers understand the role of simplistic, narratives in spreading misinformation. The video also provides a good explanation of the differences between misinformation and disinformation.www.freetech4teachers.com
News Evaluator website is a new interactive designed to help students develop information literacy skills.
Civic Online Reasoning, Here’s how they describe themselves. Students are confused about how to evaluate online information. We all are. The new Civic Online Reasoning (COR) curriculum, developed by the Stanford History Education Group, provides free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world. Article
Interactive Digital Future Guide
What do you see when you imagine the year 2050? What will the world look like? Where might we live? How will we feed ourselves? How do we care for a future that we can’t even imagine? Your Future Guide—a first-of-its-kind digital museum interactive combining technology with storytelling—invites you on a tour of the year 2050.
Bring Current Events Into Your Classroom: Above the Noise Collection Cut through the hype surrounding controversial topics in the news to find out what's really going on. Find resources for starting conversations and creating a safe place for middle and high school students to investigate controversial topics and share their voices.
21 Sites For Short & Accessible Video “Explainers” About Current Events
The Week in Pictures displays a small collection of photographs from around the world. The pictures capture a mix of serious news stories and lighter cultural stories. The Week in Pictures collections are part of a much larger resource from the BBC simply called In Pictures. The In Pictures resource provides hundreds of images in a variety collections and slideshows about current events throughout the world. Some of the slide shows even include narration. All of the images include captions explaining what is happening in the picture and a little background knowledge about the event being photographed.www.freetech4teachers.com
Facts and Opinions Explained by Common Craft uses examples of print journalists and television commentators to help viewers understand why it is important to fact-check when they hear or read something that is presented as fact. www.freetech4teachers.com
Connect Extend Challenge is a thinking routine that helps kids make connections between new ideas and content to what they already know and to what makes sense to them. So it’s a perfect way for your students to begin thinking about primary sources and how they can be applied to your direct instruction, a video clip, a piece of literature, or something they learned last year. Site includes template
AllSides, News articles about current events are shared from a variety of sources, which are identified, based on a study, as “from the center,” “from the right,” or “from the left.” It’s a great way to compare and discuss the differences in reporting. The site also offers media bias ratings for more than 800 sources. AllSides helps students get all sides of a story or issue to sort fact from fiction and identify bias and misinformation. It offers perspectives from center-, left-, and right-leaning publications to help students compare and contrast.
Comparing Mass Media Reports of the News According to the news platform Newscompare, just 41 percent of Americans believe the mass media report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.” Even fewer Americans who are politically involved believe what they see on television, read in newspapers, or hear on radio. Newscompare is trying to change that. This one-of-a-kind, free news platform takes snapshots of major media outlets every hour and lines them up side-by-side, making it easy to teach media literacy. The media reports are also searchable by date and time.
WSJ Explainers are short and relatively accessible videos on current events.
“THE NEWS EVALUATOR” IS A NEW INTERACTIVE DESIGNED TO HELP TEACH INFORMATION LITERACY
✅What The Fact is a series of videos created by Newsy in partnership with PolitiFact. They analyze if claims made by figures in current events are true or not.
Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world. by Joyce Valenza in the School Library Journal
Visual to Help you Teach Students
Article: Teachers leverage students' interest in current events to build higher-level reading and writing skills
Help Students Fight Misinformation Around the Capitol Insurrection (KGED)
Lessons and Kits (Project Look Smart)
Teen Fact-Checking Network—part of the MediaWise Project puts together videos debunking false claims, half-truths and fantasy.
Teaching While White about the anxiety white teachers often feel while trying to teach about those difficult topics, especially to students of color.
Analyzing Propaganda Techniques Used to Disrupt Democracy Worldwide PBS affiliate WETA has made available a list of propaganda techniques that make false connections (such as the techniques of “transfer” and “testimonial”), or constitute special appeals (such as “bandwagon” and “fear”), or are types of logical fallacy (for example, “unwarranted extrapolation”). The list, which provides definitions and examples, is adapted from Propaganda Critic, a website dedicated to promoting techniques of propaganda analysis among critically minded citizens.
Discussing Propaganda Techniques in Online Political AdsIn this ReadWriteThink lesson, students read or view a literary text, and then identify and discuss examples of propaganda techniques in the text. Students then explore the use of propaganda in popular culture by looking at examples in the media.
Exploring Propaganda in the Digital AgeThe Mind Over Media web platform gives students aged 13 and up an opportunity to explore the subject of contemporary propaganda by hosting thousands of examples of 21st-century propaganda from around the world. Users can upload, examine, and discuss examples of propaganda from their daily lives.
Civic Online Reasoning is a free resource from the Stanford History Education Group. Currently, Civic Online Reasoning offers twenty activity plans that you can download and or access as Google Docs when you register for a free account on the Stanford History Education Group's website. The activities include templates for building lessons on evaluating social media claims, evaluating a website's reliability, researching claims made on social media (and other places), and comparing evidence from multiple sites www.freetech4teachers.com
Digital Citizenship Curriculum (by Common Sense Education): Free K-12 lessons on news and media literacy.
Resources For Fighting Islamophobia In School
Learning for Justice Educate children and youth to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to educators—teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioner,. to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants. The program emphasizes social justice and anti-bias. It has a resources called “Moment.” Every weekly moment (they have an impressive archive) “contains critical materials to address what’s happening in the classroom – and the culture – right now. ”
RealClearPolitics is a political news and polling data aggregator. The site's founders say their goal is to give readers "ideological diversity". Politico Executive Editor Jim VandeHei has called the site "an essential stop for anyone interested in politics."RealClearPolitics is a political news and polling data aggregator that also enables people to fact . check the news stories. The site's founders say their goal is to give readers "ideological diversity". Politico Executive Editor Jim VandeHei has called the site "an essential stop for anyone interested in politics."
- RealClearHistory You get the same sort of article aggregation from a variety of places in a variety of topics. RealClearHistory is a decent place to find interesting resources and insight. To take full advantage, be sure to use the search feature in the top right to find articles, resources, and maps.Along the left hand side of RealClearHistory, you’ll find a section titled The Map Room that lists some of their most recent map related articles. For some reason, I’ve had trouble getting the Map Room link to work, so don’t be afraid to use the search feature if this is happening to you. You might try this link of map related search results to start.
The Sift (by the News Literacy Project): A weekly newsletter digest of trending stories and fact checks, focusing on viral memes and social media posts. Each newsletter also ends with tips on incorporating the content into classrooms.
Snopes“When misinformation obscures the truth and readers don’t know what to trust, Snopes’ fact-checking and original, investigative reporting lights the way to evidence-based and contextualized analysis. We always link to and document our sources so readers are empowered to do independent research and make up their own minds.”
PolitiFact“Fact-checking journalism is the heart of PolitiFact. Our core principles are independence, transparency, fairness, thorough reporting and clear writing. The reason we publish is to give citizens the information they need to govern themselves in a democracy.”
Factcheck.org “We re a nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship and to increase public knowledge and understanding.”
AllSides“AllSides™ is a media solutions company that strengthens our democratic society with balanced news, media bias ratings, diverse perspectives, and real conversation. We expose people to information and ideas from all sides of the political spectrum so they can better understand the world — and each other.”
Google Fact Check Explorer“This tool allows you to easily browse and search for fact checks. For example, you can search for a politician’s statement, or for a topic. You can also restrict results to a specific publisher. You can search by keywords and see a list of matching claims and the corresponding fact checks. Keywords can be anything from specific topics to full politician quotes. Basically anything you would also put into the regular Google Search bar.
Analyzing How Words Communicate Bias (Teaching Tolerance): Get students to analyze the tone, word choice, and messaging of newscasts, paying particular attention to biased language.
Challenging Confirmation Bias Bias can cloud our critical thinking, so this lesson gets students recognizing their own biases and working with and against them.
Article: Teaching Current Events in the Age of Social Media
Article: Two States. Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories. is a new New York Times interactive comparing textbooks used in California and in Texas, and how they talk about the same topics.
New Yorker cartoon by @JoeDator:
PBS New Hour"To Fix Fake News Look to Yellow Journalism"
In this short (4-minute) audio NPR report, you can listen to Sam Wineburg discuss the findings of the study and suggest how teachers and librarians need to proceed in teaching the skills of news literacy: https://www.npr.org/player/embed/503129818/503141179
NewsFeed Defenders iCivics in unveils a new information literacy game that engages students with the standards of journalism, showing them how to spot a variety of methods behind the viral deceptions they face today.
Factious Game where students read articles and make decisions on validity and biases.
Can You Spot the Deceptive Facebook Post? is an interactive quiz from The New York Times.
Cognitive Bias Video Thinking you know something you don't
An Engaging Word Game Helps Students Grasp Implicit Bias A simple fill-in-the-blank exercise helped students understand the power of words and the way they might convey unspoken beliefs.
Everyone Has Invisible Bias. This Lesson Shows Students How to Recognize It, Whiting describes how she removed words from a New York Times opinion essay to create a new, highly engaging activity for a 10th-grade class.
Checkology offers interactive modules for students to complete. Each of the modules is comprised of between twenty and forty-seven instructional video clips and interactive comprehension checks. The four modules are titled Info Zones, Democracy's Watchdog, Practicing Quality Journalism, and Misinformation. The contents of the modules gets progressively more difficult as each section is completed. www.freetech4teachers.com
The News Hour is an online game from NATO (yes, NATO) “designed to help readers identify online misinformation.” Unfortunately, you can only play it if you are logged-on to Facebook, which makes it problematic to use with students at school. You can read more about it at this Forbes article, NATO’s Latest Weapon: A Facebook Game For Fake News Countering.
Sample Media Evaluation Questions
Can You Spot the Problem With These Headlines? is a TED-Ed lesson. The short video lesson walks students through dissecting a couple of hypothetical news headlines. By watching the video students can begin to understand how headlines are written to entice readers and how misleading headlines are created. www.freetech4teachers.com
Lessons for Analyzing Contemporary PropagandaThe Mind Over Media web platform provides an opportunity for students aged 13 and up to explore the subject of contemporary propaganda by hosting thousands of examples of 21st-century propaganda from around the world. Users can upload, examine, and discuss examples of propaganda from their daily lives. By examining propaganda, rating its potential impact, and commenting on it, students can share their interpretations with others. Lesson plans deepen the learning by offering additional information, structuring discussion activities, and enabling students to demonstrate their learning through multimedia production experiences.
Political Typology Quiz Are you a Core Conservative? A Solid Liberal? Or somewhere in between? Take our quiz to find out which one of our Political Typology groups is your best match.
KQED has a nice article with a lesson plan and resources at The Honest Truth about Fake News . . . and How Not to Fall for It.
This One Weird Trick Will Help You Spot Clickbait is another TED-Ed video that teaches viewers how headlines are created to entice readers to click on an article. The video also explains how a small kernel of truth or a small and inconclusive study will be manipulated to create an article and a clickbait headline.
In this short (4-minute) audio NPR report, you can listen to Sam Wineburg discuss the findings of the study and suggest how teachers and librarians need to proceed in teaching the skills of news literacy: https://www.npr.org/player/embed/503129818/503141179
- PBS NewsHour Extra: Did Fake News Influence the Outcome of Election 2016?
- Common Sense Media: Turn Students into Fact-Finding Web Detectives
- Channel One News: Lesson Plan: How to Spot Fake News
- The News Literacy Project: Ten Questions For Fake News Detection
- EasyBib: Identifying Fake News: An Infographic and Educator Resources
- EasyBib: How Savvy are Your Students?: 7 Fake Websites to Really Test Their Evaluation Skills
NewsFeed Defenders iCivics in unveils a new information literacy game that engages students with the standards of journalism, showing them how to spot a variety of methods behind the viral deceptions they face today.
Factious Game where students read articles and make decisions on validity and biases.
Can You Spot the Deceptive Facebook Post? is an interactive quiz from The New York Times.
Cognitive Bias Video Thinking you know something you don't
An Engaging Word Game Helps Students Grasp Implicit Bias A simple fill-in-the-blank exercise helped students understand the power of words and the way they might convey unspoken beliefs.
Everyone Has Invisible Bias. This Lesson Shows Students How to Recognize It, Whiting describes how she removed words from a New York Times opinion essay to create a new, highly engaging activity for a 10th-grade class.
Checkology offers interactive modules for students to complete. Each of the modules is comprised of between twenty and forty-seven instructional video clips and interactive comprehension checks. The four modules are titled Info Zones, Democracy's Watchdog, Practicing Quality Journalism, and Misinformation. The contents of the modules gets progressively more difficult as each section is completed. www.freetech4teachers.com
- “InfoZones” is a key foundational lesson of our Checkology® virtual classroom. It categorizes information based on its purpose so you can better understand what you’re seeing:
The News Hour is an online game from NATO (yes, NATO) “designed to help readers identify online misinformation.” Unfortunately, you can only play it if you are logged-on to Facebook, which makes it problematic to use with students at school. You can read more about it at this Forbes article, NATO’s Latest Weapon: A Facebook Game For Fake News Countering.
Sample Media Evaluation Questions
Can You Spot the Problem With These Headlines? is a TED-Ed lesson. The short video lesson walks students through dissecting a couple of hypothetical news headlines. By watching the video students can begin to understand how headlines are written to entice readers and how misleading headlines are created. www.freetech4teachers.com
Lessons for Analyzing Contemporary PropagandaThe Mind Over Media web platform provides an opportunity for students aged 13 and up to explore the subject of contemporary propaganda by hosting thousands of examples of 21st-century propaganda from around the world. Users can upload, examine, and discuss examples of propaganda from their daily lives. By examining propaganda, rating its potential impact, and commenting on it, students can share their interpretations with others. Lesson plans deepen the learning by offering additional information, structuring discussion activities, and enabling students to demonstrate their learning through multimedia production experiences.
Political Typology Quiz Are you a Core Conservative? A Solid Liberal? Or somewhere in between? Take our quiz to find out which one of our Political Typology groups is your best match.
KQED has a nice article with a lesson plan and resources at The Honest Truth about Fake News . . . and How Not to Fall for It.
This One Weird Trick Will Help You Spot Clickbait is another TED-Ed video that teaches viewers how headlines are created to entice readers to click on an article. The video also explains how a small kernel of truth or a small and inconclusive study will be manipulated to create an article and a clickbait headline.
K-12
Important NY Times Video: “How Europe Outsources Migrant Suffering at Sea
Good Explanations of Inflation, Recession, and Bubbles. www.freetech4teachers.com
Current Events Assignment Template Level1 | Level 2
Dollar Street, a project created by Gapminder, sent teams of photographers around the world to take photos of over 264 homes in 50 different countries and uploaded them onto the website, allowing us to see how different people live across the world at different income points. The project imagines the world as a street ordered by income…poor families live at one end and rich families live at the other. A team of photographers went out and photographed the everyday items owned by families of all income levels — shoes, toothbrushes, TVs, beds, lights, sinks — so that visitors to the site can see how much income affects how families live.
Newsela partnered with the American Press Institute in October of 2016. Now whenever kids read an article on their electronic device, in addition to their normal comprehension questions, they're prompted to ask questions about the article itself: Where do the facts come from? Is there a bias? What's missing from this piece?
The Global News Project This is a multimedia platforms that employs the power of digital storytelling to explore and investigate key concepts and issues related to various aspects of our world. The Global News Project features films, documentaries, photo essays, and essays that shed light on issues related to environment, culture, and social diversity.
21 Sites For Short & Accessible Video “Explainers” About Current Events
News In Levels offers similar resources, but without the ability to track student progress online. The site is free.
Primary sources provide engaging prompts for current news analysis. On a weekly basis, select a primary source from the Library of Congress that mirrors a topic in the news cycle. Using primary sources as prompts encourages students to compare and contrast similarities and historic differences between events of today and those of the past.
Xyza is a news experience made just for elementary and middle school–aged children. Whether reading, watching, responding, or contributing, students get the opportunity to learn about the events that are occurring in the world right now. Xyza’s news stories cover politics, world events, entertainment, sports, arts, culture, science, technology, and more.
Campfire is a virtual exchange program that leverages technology to enable meaningful cross-cultural dialogue and collaboration. Across history and cultures, campfires have brought together people of diverse backgrounds to share warmth and shelter, conversation and storytelling. Global Nomads Group takes this campfire concept global, giving youth worldwide a virtual space to exchange their experiences, bypassing the borders that prevent them from meeting in person. Using a project-based curriculum, students work together with a partner classroom from another country to explore global citizenship through investigation of the driving question,
Strategies for Making a Difference from the newly revised edition of Holocaust and Human Behavior, to challenge your students to do just this. Help them think through small steps they can take to bring about positive change in their community.
Teaching Civics website – a place with over 800 lesson plans. They also have some handy ed resources.
What Immigration Stories Teach Us
To help students understand the complexities and nuances of immigration, teachers need to recognize that immigrant stories are rich and powerful. Immigrant stories need to be analyzed and studied, not just read. Find resources for this purpose.
Classroom Conversations with the World Looking for a way to engage your students with a global partner class in the context of your curriculum? That's exactly what our Classroom Conversations with the World program does!
C-SPAN Classroom's collection of Supreme Court lesson plans is divided into four sections. Those four sections are The Process and Structure of the Judicial Branch, Judicial Interpretation, Supreme Court Cases, and History of the Supreme Court. All of the lesson plans follow the same structure of using video clips from C-SPAN's library to introduce and explain a concept or court case followed by a set of discussion questions for students to answer. www.freetech4teachers.com
Realistic Courtroom SimulationsEnrichment activities and resources dealing with the federal courts, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution bring realistic court experiences into the lives of high school students. These original, courtroom-ready and classroom-ready resources are the centerpiece of the federal courts’ national and local educational outreach to high school students and their teachers. The classroom and courtroom activities apply contemporary Supreme Court cases to today’s teen issues. The court simulations offer real-life experiences with judges and attorneys at local federal courthouses. All participants are involved in the courtroom action, most important, as jurors. The activities are supported by interactive web resources and multimedia tools, including videos and podcasts on court fundamentals. In addition, federal judges across the nation host in-court events for high school students and programs for teachers. To find a nearby federal court, educators can go to the online court locator or contact the National Outreach Manager at [email protected].
SchoolJournalism.org: News, Journalism and Media Literacy: This rich portal, administered by the Reynolds High School Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, contains a wealth of resources and suggested tools for teachers of journalism and the rest of us. Check out the interdisciplinary News Literacy Model Curriculum and Lesson Plans as well as the Six Principles of News Literacy
Teaching Kids News ( gr 2- 8)
features timely and relevant news stories written on a level that students can comprehend. Every day (except on holidays), Teaching Kids News offers a new article, based on what’s actually happening in the world. Every story is in student-friendly language. Each article is accompanied by discussion questions, writing prompts, reading prompts and vocabulary words. Beyond making the vocabulary accessible, Teaching Kids News provides context for each news story so students can understand what’s going on and why. The curriculum connections encourage students to think critically not only about the story itself but also about the way the story is presented: Does the journalist have a bias? If so, what is it? How might the story be written differently by another journalist?
The GTG Visualization Tool is an interactive global data mapping of hundreds of organizations that support the education, health, well-being, and success of young women and girls globally. Users can select a country or service area and see a list of organizations serving that geographic location, as well as the services they provide and their websites. Currently, the Visualization Tool includes information for 286 organizations. Find the GTG Collaborative Visualization Tool here.
Lessons on Analyzing Media
TestTube News probes deep into topics making the news and provides explanatory and challenging commentaries on these topics.
The Uprooted is a useful interactive map demonstrating the extent of today’s world refugee crisis.
Teaching About Refugees A website of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), presents free and adaptable teaching materials on refugees, asylum, migration, and statelessness, as well as a section dedicated to professional development and guidance for elementary and secondary school teachers on including refugee children in their classes. The site’s sections are entitled “Words Matter,” “Facts and Figures About Refugees,” “UNHCR Media Materials and Reports,” “Teaching Materials,” “Including Refugees in Your Classroom,” and “Other Teaching Resources.”
In Search of Refuge that is designed for “Mapping forced displacement from 1951 to 2017.”
The Best Sites For Learning About World Refugees
Quartz has created an interactive that lets you find the expected life expectancy for people living in most census tracts in the United States.
Data.Census.gov you can find, read, and analyze data sets. Beyond that you can filter data sets and even create custom maps of the data sets. I lost at least an hour of my day messing about with the mapping tool. Watch this short video
Generation Global is a completely free resource that is designed to help students learn how to work across cultures. Cross-cultural dialogue is at the core and heart of what they do and how they believe we can better counter conflict and violence around the world. They have an excellent collection of resources and a wonderful platform for helping to bring students together to begin discussions.
Suppression Trail, The New York Times has created a great learning “game” to help people understand the difficulties many face when they want to vote in the United States. Check out “The Voter Suppression Trail,” done in the style of the classic Oregon Trail game.
50 Ways to Teach with Current Events, the article describes 50 useful strategies for incorporating contemporary issues into your instruction.
Teaching Tolerance Videos and photo essays depict life experiences around the world. Use the Mix It Up activities to have students identify social boundaries at school, and then have them use primary-source documents to find similar boundaries in history.
Global Oneness Project This site showcases global life stories. Let students view the videos on climate change or sustainability, and then have them go out and create their own video that captures a cultural experience in school or their own community.
6 INTERACTIVE TOOLS TO BETTER UNDERSTAND THE CLIMATE CRISIS
The Best Sites To Introduce Environmental Issues Into The Classroom,
he Best Resources On Teens Demanding An Effective Response To Climate Change
The Best Online Carbon Calculators
Readworks.org should definitely be on your list. This website offers a wide range of lesson plans, comprehension units, and reading passages organized by skill and Lexile level. New feature allows you to adjust reading level of a text.
News-O-Matic offers children 7 to 11 their first DAILY newspaper! It produces five news stories each day, covering the latest in world news, science, sports, as well as the wacky stories. With News-O-Matic, readers will also have access to amazing history timelines, fun news games, interactive maps, and countless other features. Readers will be able to rate the articles, ask questions, and even submit drawings that relate to the news. Ways to use in the classroom.
Freckle It’s an “adaptive” platform where teachers can set up free virtual classrooms (it looks like it’s free to individual teachers, but schools and districts can pay for more features) and is supposed to differentiate in English, Math and Social Studies content. "Freckle empowers teachers to differentiate instruction across Math, ELA, Social Studies and Science."
Xyza is a news experience made just for elementary and middle school–aged children. Whether reading, watching, responding, or contributing, students get the opportunity to learn about the events that are occurring in the world right now. Xyza’s news stories cover politics, world events, entertainment, sports, arts, culture, science, technology, and more.
CommonLit’s website full of leveled passages for students in fifth through twelfth grade. It organizes texts into collections to make it easy for teachers to find a passage to share with their students.
TestTube News probes deep into topics making the news and provides explanatory and challenging commentaries on these topics. For instance, with the latest outbreak of Panama Papers scandal, TestTube News has this excellent video explaining what Panama Papers are all about.
Rank Country A tool for comparing demographic data from different countries.
The Good Country Index: The idea of the Good Country Index is simple: to measure what each country on earth contributes to the common good of humanity, and what it takes away, relative to its size.
Tools For Comparing Demographics Of Different Countries.
It Were My Home will show you a comparison of geographic size of your country with that of another of your choosing. Beyond the size comparison, If It Were My Home shows you comparisons of twelve health and economics statistics about life in different countries. To view the comparisons just select two countries from the lists and click compare.
Jellybean Scoop is a service that features fun and interesting news stories on four reading levels. Along with each story you will find comprehension questions and vocabulary lists. Larry Ferlazzo wrote a review of the articles and activities here.
NEWSELA gr K-12
emphasis on nonfiction reading,provides daily current events articles written specifically for K–12 students. Each day the site adds three new articles to the collection. Categories include War & Peace, Science, Kids, Money, Law, Health and Arts. For every article, there are versions written at different levels. With just a few clicks, a teacher can provide the same story leveled for students of differing reading ability There is now a dedicated section of Newsela to help teachers connect literature to informational text. The Text Sets section of their site provides a handful of articles that correspond to titles commonly included in book lists for English Language Arts teachers. Also- Newsela iPad app
Listenwise ( gr. 6 - 12) makes it easy to bring authentic voices and compelling non-fiction stories to the classroom. Teach your students to Listen with the Power of Public Radio. Curates the best of public radio to keep teaching connected to the real world and build student listening skills at the same time. Vast range of solid current event info and historical stories from public radio let students make genuine connections.
Science News for Students is an award-winning online publication dedicated to providing age-appropriate, topical science news to learners, parents, and educators. SNS, which is free to use, helps to fulfill the Society’s mission by connecting the latest in scientific research to learning in and out of the classroom. Science News for Students publishes award-winning journalism on research across the breadth of science, health, and technology fields, with the aim to bring these new developments to a younger audience.
Breaking News - Are you looking for a site filled with great news articles? Discover this wonderful resource that allows you to assign a reading that provides same content at different reading levels. It is free and filled with ready-to-use EFL / ESL lesson plans on the latest breaking news -in 7 levels.
Google News Newspaper archive. In the Google News Newspaper archive you can search for a specific newspaper, search for article titles, or as demonstrated below you can search for a topic. Video tutorial
Unfiltered News is a site that uses an interactive cartogram to help you find trending news stories from around the world. To find stories through Unfiltered News simply open the website and click on a topic listed within one of the circles on the map. Once you've made a selection a list of stories will appear on the right side of your screen. Click on a story to read it in full. From the menu on the right side of the screen you can choose a different location and a new list of stories will appear.
Watchup. This free app allows you to create your own news program by choosing short clips from different news sources
Newspaper Map for locating and reading newspapers from locations all around the world. Newspaper Map claims to have geolocated 10,000 newspapers. To find a newspaper you can browse the map then click on a placemark to open the link within to read a newspaper. You can also locate newspapers by using the search boxes to locate a newspaper by title or location. Along with links to the newspapers, Newspapers Map provides links to translate the newspapers you find on the map.
Historical Newspapers Mapped
U.S. News Map an archive of American newspapers printed between 1836 and 1925. You can search the archive by entering a keyword or phrase. The results of your search will be displayed on an interactive map. Click on any of the markers on the map and you'll be shown a list of newspaper articles related to your search term. Click on a listed article to read it on the Library of Congress' Chronicling America website.
News Map organizes and displays news stories from around the world. News Map uses Google News to source the stories displayed in the grid so the content is frequently updated. The stories are displayed in a color coded grid reflective of how popular or important a story is at any given time. You can select the country or countries from which you would like to see the news. You may also select which type of news stories, (world news, national news, sports, etc) you want to see displayed. By selecting multiple countries you can discover patterns in the news across the world.
U.S. News Map produced by Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia offers another interesting way to encourage students to explore digital archives. The U.S. News Map is based on the Chronicling America newspaper collection hosted by the Library of Congress. When you search on the U.S. News Map the results of your search will be displayed on an interactive map. Clicking on a placemarker the map will take you to a list of articles from newspapers in the area around the placemarker. You can then select an article from the list and read it on the Chronicling America website www.freetech4teachers.com
NBC Learn search for relevant content by standards. “The videos and primary resources are all from NBC News programs, and many of them provide additional teaching resources.
DOGOnews a next-generation online network empowering kids to engage with digital media in a fun, safe and social environment. News section has current events and news from all around the world. Written for and in some cases by children. The Maps section is an interactive way for younger readers to read news headlines geotagged on a world map. Learn about the world and see where it’s happening. Alao, teachers can set up their own DOGONews page and create a very personalized learning experience for their kids.
PBS NewsHour Extra is a good site for middle school and high school students. The site offers a searchable database of articles. A searchable database of lesson plans is also available on PBS NewsHour Extra. www.freetech4teachers.com
Your Life On Earth is a feature of the BBC's Earth website. Your Life On Earth shows you how the world has changed during your lifetime. Enter your birthdate and Your Life On Earth will show you things like how much the world's population has grown, how many new species have been discovered, and how many earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have occurred since you were born.
20 Good Map Creation Tools for Students
Newspaper Map is a tool for locating and reading newspapers from locations all around the world. Newspaper Map claims to have geolocated 10,000 newspapers. To find a newspaper you can browse the map then click on a placemark to open the link within to read a newspaper. You can also locate newspapers by using the search boxes to locate a newspaper by title or location. Along with links to the newspapers, Newspapers Map provides links to translate the newspapers you find on the map.
Breaking News presents a constant stream of headlines from around the world. A map of story locations resides behind the news stream that greets you on the homepage. Click the tiny map icon in the upper-right corner of the news stream to find stories by location instead of by topic.
DOGOnews a next-generation online network empowering kids to engage with digital media in a fun, safe and social environment. News section has current events and news from all around the world. Written for and in some cases by children. The Maps section is an interactive way for younger readers to read news headlines geotagged on a world map. Learn about the world and see where it’s happening. Alao, teachers can set up their own DOGONews page and create a very personalized learning experience for their kids.
PBS NewsHour Extra is a good site for middle school and high school students. The site offers a searchable database of articles. A searchable database of lesson plans is also available on PBS NewsHour Extra. www.freetech4teachers.com
C-SPAN Classroom the Bell Ringer category of activities are short videos about contemporary issues in government, politics, and business. Each Bell Ringer video is accompanied by a list of key vocabulary terms and a list of discussion questions to use in your classroom. C-SPAN Classroom Deliberations is a good resource for teachers of U.S. history or civics. On the site you will find 34 lesson plans centered around issues currently debated in Congress and in U.S. political discourse in general. A few of the latest lesson plans deal with Electoral College reform, third party candidate participation in Presidential debates, and granting asylum to refugees from countries that sponsor terrorism.
TeachUNICEF is an outreach project from UNICEF. The goal of the site is to provide lesson plans and other resources to help teachers teach about wide variety of global issues. The "explore" section of TeachUNICEF showcases materials for teaching about global issues with connections to social studies, science, math, English/language arts, foreign/world languages. Teachers can filter the results according to topic and grade level.
Diffen is a nice resource for those times when you need a quick comparison of two things. Let's say you need a chart to highlight the differences between latitude and longitude, Diffen has that. Or perhaps you need a comparison of Medicare and Medicaid, Diffen has that too.
If you can't find the comparison that you need, you can create your own on Diffen. Diffen is a community site. Anyone who registers on Diffen can contribute to the comparisons on the site. Comparisons are not limited to text. Images can be added to the comparison charts on Diffen. An embed code is available for each chart.
TeenTribune A teacher can select grade level specific news stories as well as stories in Spanish. So you have a lot of flexibility here. Stories are selected by professional journalists working closely with teens, tweens and teachers. Teens and tweens can post comments, with all comments moderated by their teachers before they are published. There are critical thinking questions at the end of each story and actual quizzes after many of them.
After creating an account, teachers create the student accounts. This allows kids to write comments / teachers to moderate comments, teachers can manage/track quizzes students take based on stories, and lets kids access a cool photo captioning tool. (This is a lot like the New York Times “What’s going on in this picture?” feature.)
Facing the Future is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to create tools for educators that equip and motivate students to develop critical thinking skills, buildglobal awareness and engage in positive solutions for a sustainable future. The organization provides teachers with the resources they need in order to ignite their students’ interest in complex global issues while helping them to achieve academically. On the organization’s website, you’ll find free downloadable, hands-on lessons about global issues across the curriculum.
News ELA A site that can be sorted by Lexile levels. Get a full description here.
Clip Syndicate is a provider of professionally produced news videos from television stations and other media outlets around the United States. Clip Syndicate also provides videos from the Associated Press. All of the videos on Clip Syndicate are categorized into 86 different channels. Users of Clip Syndicate can embed into their blogs one video or an entire channel of videos.
GE Teach is built around the Google Earth browser plug-in. The purpose of the site is to help teachers develop lessons in which students explore spatial distributions. Visitors to GE Teach can select from a variety of physical geography and human geography layers to display and explore. A fantastic feature of GE Teach is the option use the "two Earths" mode to show two maps side-by-side. The "two Earths" mode could be useful for prompting students to make comparisons and or correlations between two maps.
ViewChange.Org has some pretty amazing short videos from around the world. This is how it describes itself: Using the power of video to tell stories about real people and progress in global development. The emphasis is on the developing world, as well as in the technology and research behind it. The site uses sophisticated Web tools that take advantage of the scope of information available on the Internet. For example, when watching a documentary on water supplies in India, links to related YouTube videos, research articles, news and blog updates will appear in adjacent windows. Semantic web tools make these links possible by analyzing context and meaning of key words.
“If It Were My Home” is a neat interactive that compares the standard of living in the United States to any other country of your choice. The site also has some other neat features.
Newsy is a site that — in short videos — compares how major news events are covered by media throughout the world.
The Cost of Living Map produced with data from The Council for Community and Economic Research allows you to quickly compare the costs of living in U.S. cities. To use the map simply select two cities from the drop-down menu on the map. After making your selections you will see a graphic and an indication of which city is more expensive. The comparison is based on the costs of housing, healthcare, utilities, groceries, and transportation.
MappingWorlds
the site offers users a new way to look at the world by resizing countries on the map in relation to a series of global issues.
Places in the News gr. 4-12
provides historical context and geography resources for current events.
Tribune by Smithsonian - Educational resources for all levels. Click on the appropriate grade level ban at the top and you will find a wide range of education content that is leveled for reading from the Smithsonian. You will be joining more than 200,000 registered teachers who are already putting these free Smithsonian Teacher resources to use in their classrooms. You will find that the site contains twice-daily AP news articles, Lexile® levels for K-12, self-scoring quizzes customized by Lexile® level, critical thinking questions, student commenting, Espanol AP articles, weekly lesson plans, weekly video, and even a weekend "Monday Morning Ready" newsletter as prep for the week ahead
NewsMap gr. 5-12
Allows the user to see all the top stories that are going on in their part of the world. The stories that are covered in more places are given size priority. Clicking on a part of the map will bring up a story about the headline.
TeachableMoment.Org gr. 3-12
Provides educators with timely teaching ideas to encourage critical thinking on issues of the day and foster a positive classroom environment
The Public Domain Review is a website that features collections of images, books, essays, audio recordings, and films that are in the public domain. Choose any of the collections to search for materials according to date, style, genre, and rights. Directions for downloading and saving media is included along with each collection of media.
Compare and Contrast Tools
Diffen - What uses in the classroom might you find to compare anything? After-all comparing and contrasting is a 21stcentury skill which would come under Critical thinking. At first you will just want to play and see how it compares. I am sure you will want to put in apples and oranges, cats and dogs, and rain and snow. You may even want to practice a little political comparison. What content area items could your students compare? How about making a lesson. Check out these two additional digital tools that could come in handy from the people at Read Write Think as described in their own words.
Dollar Street - Compare and contrast how people of various income levels live around the world.
New TIME Video: “A Look At Income Inequality In The United States”
Justice Map: Visualize race and income data for your community and country.
Inequality is an undeniable fact in America. CNN has published a useful interactive It includes a number of interactive graphs on wealth inequality.
U.S. Income Inequality Worsens, Widening To A New Gap article from NPR.
Three Interactive Digital Tools to Compare and Contrast
Venn Diagram - The Venn Diagram app allows users to compare and contrast information in a visually appealing way. Sounds like a 21st Century Skill useful from fine arts to applied science
Multiple Points of View
We’re having our kids read more about contemporary issues and events. But most of them have trouble separating bias and opinion from facts. The Multiple Points of View can help develop this skill. (The New York Times has put together a great list of useful tools for helping kids make sense of print and online news.)
Inquiry Chart
I-Charts offer a planned framework for examining critical questions by integrating what is already known or thought about the topic with additional information found in several sources. On a given topic, students will have several questions to explore. These are found at the top of each individual column.
Opinion / Proof
This organizer is a great way to support historical thinking skills by asking them to share their opinions while supporting those opinions with facts. The basic idea is that an opinion can be put forward, but it should be a supported opinion – based on ideas, facts, or concepts found in the assigned evidence or based on student research. The Opinion / Proof organizer is perfect as a pre-writing activity for persuasive essays, RAFTS such as editorials, or to prepare for class debates such as the Fence Sitter.
Compare & Contrast Map - This interactive graphic organizer helps students develop an outline for one of three types of comparison essays: whole-to-whole, similarities-to-differences, or point-to-point. A link in the introduction to the Comparison and Contrast Guide can give students the chance to get definitions and look at examples before they begin working.
Scholastic News gr. 1 - 8
Well-designed and well-written, Scholastic News is a site for students and teachers. Choose your grade level from the drop-down box (first grade through middle school) or select special editions such as New York Times Upfront or SuperScience. Junior Scholastic Online (for junior high or middle school) combines original reporting with an interactive news quiz (ten multiple-choice questions about the week's current events), and an opinion poll ("Should NASCAR racing be banned?"). Special Reports on Global Warming, Hurricane Katrina One Year Later, and Kids in Afghanistan, round out the offering.
Our Little Earth gr. 4-8
provides bi-weekly summaries of the world's biggest news stories. The summaries are written for students. Each edition includes video clips along with the stories. In each edition you'll find stories appropriate for use in social studies, math, and science lessons. You may also find stories about the arts, entertainment, and popular culture. A few "did you know" questions appear in each issue as well. An archive containing every edition going back to 2007 is available too.
The Places We Live gr 5 -12 is a powerful collection of images, sounds, and stories of life in four of the world's poorest slums. The introduction to The Places We Live starts with a slideshow containing statistics from the UN regarding the world's population that lives in slums and the UN definition of the term slum.
The Day in Pictures. gr. 3-12
displays a small collection of photographs from around the world. The pictures capture a mix of serious news stories and lighter cultural stories. The Day in Pictures collections are part of a much larger resource from the BBC simply called In Pictures. The In Pictures resource provides hundreds of images in a variety collections and slideshows about current events throughout the world. Some of the slide shows even include narration. All of the images include captions explaining what is happening in the picture and a little background knowledge about the event being photographed.
Doodle Buzz gr. 5-12 an interesting way to look at the news. To find news stories enter a term in the search box, click go, then drag your cursor across the screen to reveal news stories related to your search term. The more you doodle the more stories are revealed. You can read excerpts from the stories or click through to read the full article on the original source
UPI Photo Library Grades 4 to 12
This searchable library of UPI news photos could be a great addition to in-class current events discussions.
Newspapers in the US Grades 4 to 12
Here's an extensive collection of links to online editions of hundreds of U.S. newspapers. This is a particularly valuable resource for students interested in activities in small towns and cities that receive less national coverage
Good Explanations of Inflation, Recession, and Bubbles. www.freetech4teachers.com
Current Events Assignment Template Level1 | Level 2
Dollar Street, a project created by Gapminder, sent teams of photographers around the world to take photos of over 264 homes in 50 different countries and uploaded them onto the website, allowing us to see how different people live across the world at different income points. The project imagines the world as a street ordered by income…poor families live at one end and rich families live at the other. A team of photographers went out and photographed the everyday items owned by families of all income levels — shoes, toothbrushes, TVs, beds, lights, sinks — so that visitors to the site can see how much income affects how families live.
Newsela partnered with the American Press Institute in October of 2016. Now whenever kids read an article on their electronic device, in addition to their normal comprehension questions, they're prompted to ask questions about the article itself: Where do the facts come from? Is there a bias? What's missing from this piece?
The Global News Project This is a multimedia platforms that employs the power of digital storytelling to explore and investigate key concepts and issues related to various aspects of our world. The Global News Project features films, documentaries, photo essays, and essays that shed light on issues related to environment, culture, and social diversity.
21 Sites For Short & Accessible Video “Explainers” About Current Events
News In Levels offers similar resources, but without the ability to track student progress online. The site is free.
Primary sources provide engaging prompts for current news analysis. On a weekly basis, select a primary source from the Library of Congress that mirrors a topic in the news cycle. Using primary sources as prompts encourages students to compare and contrast similarities and historic differences between events of today and those of the past.
Xyza is a news experience made just for elementary and middle school–aged children. Whether reading, watching, responding, or contributing, students get the opportunity to learn about the events that are occurring in the world right now. Xyza’s news stories cover politics, world events, entertainment, sports, arts, culture, science, technology, and more.
Campfire is a virtual exchange program that leverages technology to enable meaningful cross-cultural dialogue and collaboration. Across history and cultures, campfires have brought together people of diverse backgrounds to share warmth and shelter, conversation and storytelling. Global Nomads Group takes this campfire concept global, giving youth worldwide a virtual space to exchange their experiences, bypassing the borders that prevent them from meeting in person. Using a project-based curriculum, students work together with a partner classroom from another country to explore global citizenship through investigation of the driving question,
Strategies for Making a Difference from the newly revised edition of Holocaust and Human Behavior, to challenge your students to do just this. Help them think through small steps they can take to bring about positive change in their community.
Teaching Civics website – a place with over 800 lesson plans. They also have some handy ed resources.
What Immigration Stories Teach Us
To help students understand the complexities and nuances of immigration, teachers need to recognize that immigrant stories are rich and powerful. Immigrant stories need to be analyzed and studied, not just read. Find resources for this purpose.
Classroom Conversations with the World Looking for a way to engage your students with a global partner class in the context of your curriculum? That's exactly what our Classroom Conversations with the World program does!
C-SPAN Classroom's collection of Supreme Court lesson plans is divided into four sections. Those four sections are The Process and Structure of the Judicial Branch, Judicial Interpretation, Supreme Court Cases, and History of the Supreme Court. All of the lesson plans follow the same structure of using video clips from C-SPAN's library to introduce and explain a concept or court case followed by a set of discussion questions for students to answer. www.freetech4teachers.com
Realistic Courtroom SimulationsEnrichment activities and resources dealing with the federal courts, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution bring realistic court experiences into the lives of high school students. These original, courtroom-ready and classroom-ready resources are the centerpiece of the federal courts’ national and local educational outreach to high school students and their teachers. The classroom and courtroom activities apply contemporary Supreme Court cases to today’s teen issues. The court simulations offer real-life experiences with judges and attorneys at local federal courthouses. All participants are involved in the courtroom action, most important, as jurors. The activities are supported by interactive web resources and multimedia tools, including videos and podcasts on court fundamentals. In addition, federal judges across the nation host in-court events for high school students and programs for teachers. To find a nearby federal court, educators can go to the online court locator or contact the National Outreach Manager at [email protected].
SchoolJournalism.org: News, Journalism and Media Literacy: This rich portal, administered by the Reynolds High School Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, contains a wealth of resources and suggested tools for teachers of journalism and the rest of us. Check out the interdisciplinary News Literacy Model Curriculum and Lesson Plans as well as the Six Principles of News Literacy
Teaching Kids News ( gr 2- 8)
features timely and relevant news stories written on a level that students can comprehend. Every day (except on holidays), Teaching Kids News offers a new article, based on what’s actually happening in the world. Every story is in student-friendly language. Each article is accompanied by discussion questions, writing prompts, reading prompts and vocabulary words. Beyond making the vocabulary accessible, Teaching Kids News provides context for each news story so students can understand what’s going on and why. The curriculum connections encourage students to think critically not only about the story itself but also about the way the story is presented: Does the journalist have a bias? If so, what is it? How might the story be written differently by another journalist?
The GTG Visualization Tool is an interactive global data mapping of hundreds of organizations that support the education, health, well-being, and success of young women and girls globally. Users can select a country or service area and see a list of organizations serving that geographic location, as well as the services they provide and their websites. Currently, the Visualization Tool includes information for 286 organizations. Find the GTG Collaborative Visualization Tool here.
Lessons on Analyzing Media
TestTube News probes deep into topics making the news and provides explanatory and challenging commentaries on these topics.
The Uprooted is a useful interactive map demonstrating the extent of today’s world refugee crisis.
Teaching About Refugees A website of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), presents free and adaptable teaching materials on refugees, asylum, migration, and statelessness, as well as a section dedicated to professional development and guidance for elementary and secondary school teachers on including refugee children in their classes. The site’s sections are entitled “Words Matter,” “Facts and Figures About Refugees,” “UNHCR Media Materials and Reports,” “Teaching Materials,” “Including Refugees in Your Classroom,” and “Other Teaching Resources.”
In Search of Refuge that is designed for “Mapping forced displacement from 1951 to 2017.”
The Best Sites For Learning About World Refugees
Quartz has created an interactive that lets you find the expected life expectancy for people living in most census tracts in the United States.
Data.Census.gov you can find, read, and analyze data sets. Beyond that you can filter data sets and even create custom maps of the data sets. I lost at least an hour of my day messing about with the mapping tool. Watch this short video
Generation Global is a completely free resource that is designed to help students learn how to work across cultures. Cross-cultural dialogue is at the core and heart of what they do and how they believe we can better counter conflict and violence around the world. They have an excellent collection of resources and a wonderful platform for helping to bring students together to begin discussions.
Suppression Trail, The New York Times has created a great learning “game” to help people understand the difficulties many face when they want to vote in the United States. Check out “The Voter Suppression Trail,” done in the style of the classic Oregon Trail game.
50 Ways to Teach with Current Events, the article describes 50 useful strategies for incorporating contemporary issues into your instruction.
Teaching Tolerance Videos and photo essays depict life experiences around the world. Use the Mix It Up activities to have students identify social boundaries at school, and then have them use primary-source documents to find similar boundaries in history.
Global Oneness Project This site showcases global life stories. Let students view the videos on climate change or sustainability, and then have them go out and create their own video that captures a cultural experience in school or their own community.
- The Climate Change Tracker shows which countries are most responsible for contributing to climate change.
- A teachable moment: educators must join students in demanding climate justice is from The Guardian.
- Is Climate Change a Big Deal? shows how much have temperatures changed in cities across the US.
6 INTERACTIVE TOOLS TO BETTER UNDERSTAND THE CLIMATE CRISIS
The Best Sites To Introduce Environmental Issues Into The Classroom,
he Best Resources On Teens Demanding An Effective Response To Climate Change
The Best Online Carbon Calculators
Readworks.org should definitely be on your list. This website offers a wide range of lesson plans, comprehension units, and reading passages organized by skill and Lexile level. New feature allows you to adjust reading level of a text.
News-O-Matic offers children 7 to 11 their first DAILY newspaper! It produces five news stories each day, covering the latest in world news, science, sports, as well as the wacky stories. With News-O-Matic, readers will also have access to amazing history timelines, fun news games, interactive maps, and countless other features. Readers will be able to rate the articles, ask questions, and even submit drawings that relate to the news. Ways to use in the classroom.
Freckle It’s an “adaptive” platform where teachers can set up free virtual classrooms (it looks like it’s free to individual teachers, but schools and districts can pay for more features) and is supposed to differentiate in English, Math and Social Studies content. "Freckle empowers teachers to differentiate instruction across Math, ELA, Social Studies and Science."
Xyza is a news experience made just for elementary and middle school–aged children. Whether reading, watching, responding, or contributing, students get the opportunity to learn about the events that are occurring in the world right now. Xyza’s news stories cover politics, world events, entertainment, sports, arts, culture, science, technology, and more.
CommonLit’s website full of leveled passages for students in fifth through twelfth grade. It organizes texts into collections to make it easy for teachers to find a passage to share with their students.
TestTube News probes deep into topics making the news and provides explanatory and challenging commentaries on these topics. For instance, with the latest outbreak of Panama Papers scandal, TestTube News has this excellent video explaining what Panama Papers are all about.
Rank Country A tool for comparing demographic data from different countries.
The Good Country Index: The idea of the Good Country Index is simple: to measure what each country on earth contributes to the common good of humanity, and what it takes away, relative to its size.
Tools For Comparing Demographics Of Different Countries.
It Were My Home will show you a comparison of geographic size of your country with that of another of your choosing. Beyond the size comparison, If It Were My Home shows you comparisons of twelve health and economics statistics about life in different countries. To view the comparisons just select two countries from the lists and click compare.
Jellybean Scoop is a service that features fun and interesting news stories on four reading levels. Along with each story you will find comprehension questions and vocabulary lists. Larry Ferlazzo wrote a review of the articles and activities here.
NEWSELA gr K-12
emphasis on nonfiction reading,provides daily current events articles written specifically for K–12 students. Each day the site adds three new articles to the collection. Categories include War & Peace, Science, Kids, Money, Law, Health and Arts. For every article, there are versions written at different levels. With just a few clicks, a teacher can provide the same story leveled for students of differing reading ability There is now a dedicated section of Newsela to help teachers connect literature to informational text. The Text Sets section of their site provides a handful of articles that correspond to titles commonly included in book lists for English Language Arts teachers. Also- Newsela iPad app
Listenwise ( gr. 6 - 12) makes it easy to bring authentic voices and compelling non-fiction stories to the classroom. Teach your students to Listen with the Power of Public Radio. Curates the best of public radio to keep teaching connected to the real world and build student listening skills at the same time. Vast range of solid current event info and historical stories from public radio let students make genuine connections.
Science News for Students is an award-winning online publication dedicated to providing age-appropriate, topical science news to learners, parents, and educators. SNS, which is free to use, helps to fulfill the Society’s mission by connecting the latest in scientific research to learning in and out of the classroom. Science News for Students publishes award-winning journalism on research across the breadth of science, health, and technology fields, with the aim to bring these new developments to a younger audience.
Breaking News - Are you looking for a site filled with great news articles? Discover this wonderful resource that allows you to assign a reading that provides same content at different reading levels. It is free and filled with ready-to-use EFL / ESL lesson plans on the latest breaking news -in 7 levels.
Google News Newspaper archive. In the Google News Newspaper archive you can search for a specific newspaper, search for article titles, or as demonstrated below you can search for a topic. Video tutorial
Unfiltered News is a site that uses an interactive cartogram to help you find trending news stories from around the world. To find stories through Unfiltered News simply open the website and click on a topic listed within one of the circles on the map. Once you've made a selection a list of stories will appear on the right side of your screen. Click on a story to read it in full. From the menu on the right side of the screen you can choose a different location and a new list of stories will appear.
Watchup. This free app allows you to create your own news program by choosing short clips from different news sources
Newspaper Map for locating and reading newspapers from locations all around the world. Newspaper Map claims to have geolocated 10,000 newspapers. To find a newspaper you can browse the map then click on a placemark to open the link within to read a newspaper. You can also locate newspapers by using the search boxes to locate a newspaper by title or location. Along with links to the newspapers, Newspapers Map provides links to translate the newspapers you find on the map.
Historical Newspapers Mapped
U.S. News Map an archive of American newspapers printed between 1836 and 1925. You can search the archive by entering a keyword or phrase. The results of your search will be displayed on an interactive map. Click on any of the markers on the map and you'll be shown a list of newspaper articles related to your search term. Click on a listed article to read it on the Library of Congress' Chronicling America website.
News Map organizes and displays news stories from around the world. News Map uses Google News to source the stories displayed in the grid so the content is frequently updated. The stories are displayed in a color coded grid reflective of how popular or important a story is at any given time. You can select the country or countries from which you would like to see the news. You may also select which type of news stories, (world news, national news, sports, etc) you want to see displayed. By selecting multiple countries you can discover patterns in the news across the world.
U.S. News Map produced by Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia offers another interesting way to encourage students to explore digital archives. The U.S. News Map is based on the Chronicling America newspaper collection hosted by the Library of Congress. When you search on the U.S. News Map the results of your search will be displayed on an interactive map. Clicking on a placemarker the map will take you to a list of articles from newspapers in the area around the placemarker. You can then select an article from the list and read it on the Chronicling America website www.freetech4teachers.com
NBC Learn search for relevant content by standards. “The videos and primary resources are all from NBC News programs, and many of them provide additional teaching resources.
DOGOnews a next-generation online network empowering kids to engage with digital media in a fun, safe and social environment. News section has current events and news from all around the world. Written for and in some cases by children. The Maps section is an interactive way for younger readers to read news headlines geotagged on a world map. Learn about the world and see where it’s happening. Alao, teachers can set up their own DOGONews page and create a very personalized learning experience for their kids.
PBS NewsHour Extra is a good site for middle school and high school students. The site offers a searchable database of articles. A searchable database of lesson plans is also available on PBS NewsHour Extra. www.freetech4teachers.com
Your Life On Earth is a feature of the BBC's Earth website. Your Life On Earth shows you how the world has changed during your lifetime. Enter your birthdate and Your Life On Earth will show you things like how much the world's population has grown, how many new species have been discovered, and how many earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have occurred since you were born.
20 Good Map Creation Tools for Students
Newspaper Map is a tool for locating and reading newspapers from locations all around the world. Newspaper Map claims to have geolocated 10,000 newspapers. To find a newspaper you can browse the map then click on a placemark to open the link within to read a newspaper. You can also locate newspapers by using the search boxes to locate a newspaper by title or location. Along with links to the newspapers, Newspapers Map provides links to translate the newspapers you find on the map.
Breaking News presents a constant stream of headlines from around the world. A map of story locations resides behind the news stream that greets you on the homepage. Click the tiny map icon in the upper-right corner of the news stream to find stories by location instead of by topic.
DOGOnews a next-generation online network empowering kids to engage with digital media in a fun, safe and social environment. News section has current events and news from all around the world. Written for and in some cases by children. The Maps section is an interactive way for younger readers to read news headlines geotagged on a world map. Learn about the world and see where it’s happening. Alao, teachers can set up their own DOGONews page and create a very personalized learning experience for their kids.
PBS NewsHour Extra is a good site for middle school and high school students. The site offers a searchable database of articles. A searchable database of lesson plans is also available on PBS NewsHour Extra. www.freetech4teachers.com
C-SPAN Classroom the Bell Ringer category of activities are short videos about contemporary issues in government, politics, and business. Each Bell Ringer video is accompanied by a list of key vocabulary terms and a list of discussion questions to use in your classroom. C-SPAN Classroom Deliberations is a good resource for teachers of U.S. history or civics. On the site you will find 34 lesson plans centered around issues currently debated in Congress and in U.S. political discourse in general. A few of the latest lesson plans deal with Electoral College reform, third party candidate participation in Presidential debates, and granting asylum to refugees from countries that sponsor terrorism.
TeachUNICEF is an outreach project from UNICEF. The goal of the site is to provide lesson plans and other resources to help teachers teach about wide variety of global issues. The "explore" section of TeachUNICEF showcases materials for teaching about global issues with connections to social studies, science, math, English/language arts, foreign/world languages. Teachers can filter the results according to topic and grade level.
Diffen is a nice resource for those times when you need a quick comparison of two things. Let's say you need a chart to highlight the differences between latitude and longitude, Diffen has that. Or perhaps you need a comparison of Medicare and Medicaid, Diffen has that too.
If you can't find the comparison that you need, you can create your own on Diffen. Diffen is a community site. Anyone who registers on Diffen can contribute to the comparisons on the site. Comparisons are not limited to text. Images can be added to the comparison charts on Diffen. An embed code is available for each chart.
TeenTribune A teacher can select grade level specific news stories as well as stories in Spanish. So you have a lot of flexibility here. Stories are selected by professional journalists working closely with teens, tweens and teachers. Teens and tweens can post comments, with all comments moderated by their teachers before they are published. There are critical thinking questions at the end of each story and actual quizzes after many of them.
After creating an account, teachers create the student accounts. This allows kids to write comments / teachers to moderate comments, teachers can manage/track quizzes students take based on stories, and lets kids access a cool photo captioning tool. (This is a lot like the New York Times “What’s going on in this picture?” feature.)
Facing the Future is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to create tools for educators that equip and motivate students to develop critical thinking skills, buildglobal awareness and engage in positive solutions for a sustainable future. The organization provides teachers with the resources they need in order to ignite their students’ interest in complex global issues while helping them to achieve academically. On the organization’s website, you’ll find free downloadable, hands-on lessons about global issues across the curriculum.
News ELA A site that can be sorted by Lexile levels. Get a full description here.
Clip Syndicate is a provider of professionally produced news videos from television stations and other media outlets around the United States. Clip Syndicate also provides videos from the Associated Press. All of the videos on Clip Syndicate are categorized into 86 different channels. Users of Clip Syndicate can embed into their blogs one video or an entire channel of videos.
GE Teach is built around the Google Earth browser plug-in. The purpose of the site is to help teachers develop lessons in which students explore spatial distributions. Visitors to GE Teach can select from a variety of physical geography and human geography layers to display and explore. A fantastic feature of GE Teach is the option use the "two Earths" mode to show two maps side-by-side. The "two Earths" mode could be useful for prompting students to make comparisons and or correlations between two maps.
ViewChange.Org has some pretty amazing short videos from around the world. This is how it describes itself: Using the power of video to tell stories about real people and progress in global development. The emphasis is on the developing world, as well as in the technology and research behind it. The site uses sophisticated Web tools that take advantage of the scope of information available on the Internet. For example, when watching a documentary on water supplies in India, links to related YouTube videos, research articles, news and blog updates will appear in adjacent windows. Semantic web tools make these links possible by analyzing context and meaning of key words.
“If It Were My Home” is a neat interactive that compares the standard of living in the United States to any other country of your choice. The site also has some other neat features.
Newsy is a site that — in short videos — compares how major news events are covered by media throughout the world.
The Cost of Living Map produced with data from The Council for Community and Economic Research allows you to quickly compare the costs of living in U.S. cities. To use the map simply select two cities from the drop-down menu on the map. After making your selections you will see a graphic and an indication of which city is more expensive. The comparison is based on the costs of housing, healthcare, utilities, groceries, and transportation.
MappingWorlds
the site offers users a new way to look at the world by resizing countries on the map in relation to a series of global issues.
Places in the News gr. 4-12
provides historical context and geography resources for current events.
Tribune by Smithsonian - Educational resources for all levels. Click on the appropriate grade level ban at the top and you will find a wide range of education content that is leveled for reading from the Smithsonian. You will be joining more than 200,000 registered teachers who are already putting these free Smithsonian Teacher resources to use in their classrooms. You will find that the site contains twice-daily AP news articles, Lexile® levels for K-12, self-scoring quizzes customized by Lexile® level, critical thinking questions, student commenting, Espanol AP articles, weekly lesson plans, weekly video, and even a weekend "Monday Morning Ready" newsletter as prep for the week ahead
NewsMap gr. 5-12
Allows the user to see all the top stories that are going on in their part of the world. The stories that are covered in more places are given size priority. Clicking on a part of the map will bring up a story about the headline.
TeachableMoment.Org gr. 3-12
Provides educators with timely teaching ideas to encourage critical thinking on issues of the day and foster a positive classroom environment
The Public Domain Review is a website that features collections of images, books, essays, audio recordings, and films that are in the public domain. Choose any of the collections to search for materials according to date, style, genre, and rights. Directions for downloading and saving media is included along with each collection of media.
Compare and Contrast Tools
Diffen - What uses in the classroom might you find to compare anything? After-all comparing and contrasting is a 21stcentury skill which would come under Critical thinking. At first you will just want to play and see how it compares. I am sure you will want to put in apples and oranges, cats and dogs, and rain and snow. You may even want to practice a little political comparison. What content area items could your students compare? How about making a lesson. Check out these two additional digital tools that could come in handy from the people at Read Write Think as described in their own words.
Dollar Street - Compare and contrast how people of various income levels live around the world.
New TIME Video: “A Look At Income Inequality In The United States”
Justice Map: Visualize race and income data for your community and country.
Inequality is an undeniable fact in America. CNN has published a useful interactive It includes a number of interactive graphs on wealth inequality.
U.S. Income Inequality Worsens, Widening To A New Gap article from NPR.
Three Interactive Digital Tools to Compare and Contrast
Venn Diagram - The Venn Diagram app allows users to compare and contrast information in a visually appealing way. Sounds like a 21st Century Skill useful from fine arts to applied science
Multiple Points of View
We’re having our kids read more about contemporary issues and events. But most of them have trouble separating bias and opinion from facts. The Multiple Points of View can help develop this skill. (The New York Times has put together a great list of useful tools for helping kids make sense of print and online news.)
Inquiry Chart
I-Charts offer a planned framework for examining critical questions by integrating what is already known or thought about the topic with additional information found in several sources. On a given topic, students will have several questions to explore. These are found at the top of each individual column.
Opinion / Proof
This organizer is a great way to support historical thinking skills by asking them to share their opinions while supporting those opinions with facts. The basic idea is that an opinion can be put forward, but it should be a supported opinion – based on ideas, facts, or concepts found in the assigned evidence or based on student research. The Opinion / Proof organizer is perfect as a pre-writing activity for persuasive essays, RAFTS such as editorials, or to prepare for class debates such as the Fence Sitter.
Compare & Contrast Map - This interactive graphic organizer helps students develop an outline for one of three types of comparison essays: whole-to-whole, similarities-to-differences, or point-to-point. A link in the introduction to the Comparison and Contrast Guide can give students the chance to get definitions and look at examples before they begin working.
Scholastic News gr. 1 - 8
Well-designed and well-written, Scholastic News is a site for students and teachers. Choose your grade level from the drop-down box (first grade through middle school) or select special editions such as New York Times Upfront or SuperScience. Junior Scholastic Online (for junior high or middle school) combines original reporting with an interactive news quiz (ten multiple-choice questions about the week's current events), and an opinion poll ("Should NASCAR racing be banned?"). Special Reports on Global Warming, Hurricane Katrina One Year Later, and Kids in Afghanistan, round out the offering.
Our Little Earth gr. 4-8
provides bi-weekly summaries of the world's biggest news stories. The summaries are written for students. Each edition includes video clips along with the stories. In each edition you'll find stories appropriate for use in social studies, math, and science lessons. You may also find stories about the arts, entertainment, and popular culture. A few "did you know" questions appear in each issue as well. An archive containing every edition going back to 2007 is available too.
The Places We Live gr 5 -12 is a powerful collection of images, sounds, and stories of life in four of the world's poorest slums. The introduction to The Places We Live starts with a slideshow containing statistics from the UN regarding the world's population that lives in slums and the UN definition of the term slum.
The Day in Pictures. gr. 3-12
displays a small collection of photographs from around the world. The pictures capture a mix of serious news stories and lighter cultural stories. The Day in Pictures collections are part of a much larger resource from the BBC simply called In Pictures. The In Pictures resource provides hundreds of images in a variety collections and slideshows about current events throughout the world. Some of the slide shows even include narration. All of the images include captions explaining what is happening in the picture and a little background knowledge about the event being photographed.
Doodle Buzz gr. 5-12 an interesting way to look at the news. To find news stories enter a term in the search box, click go, then drag your cursor across the screen to reveal news stories related to your search term. The more you doodle the more stories are revealed. You can read excerpts from the stories or click through to read the full article on the original source
UPI Photo Library Grades 4 to 12
This searchable library of UPI news photos could be a great addition to in-class current events discussions.
Newspapers in the US Grades 4 to 12
Here's an extensive collection of links to online editions of hundreds of U.S. newspapers. This is a particularly valuable resource for students interested in activities in small towns and cities that receive less national coverage
Elementary
News-O-Matic is a daily newspaper for kids available on both iOS and Android devices (the app will soon be available on the Amazon Kindle Fire tablets). It provides engaging nonfiction text for young readers to help them learn about the world around them. With topics including election news, sports coverage and science discoveries, there is plenty of exciting content to capture the attention of your students. Their new update (coming soon!) will be specifically designed for use in schools. It will include custom reading levels for individual students, built-in assessments that are customizable, and analytics including quiz scores, reading levels and time spent reading. News-O-Matic will be able to support differentiated instruction while giving students access to high-interest, informational text.
Current Events Assignment Template Level1 | Level 2
News2you is a newspaper for students with autism and other disabilities that's available on the web. News2you incorporates the symbol system SymbolStix (also used in Proloquo2Go), along with voice narration.
The Week in Pictures displays a small collection of photographs from around the world. The pictures capture a mix of serious news stories and lighter cultural stories. The Week in Pictures collections are part of a much larger resource from the BBC simply called In Pictures. The In Pictures resource provides hundreds of images in a variety collections and slideshows about current events throughout the world. Some of the slide shows even include narration. All of the images include captions explaining what is happening in the picture and a little background knowledge about the event being photographed.www.freetech4teachers.com
Teaching Elementary Students About the Concept of Injustice
List of children’s books that explore race and racism
Freckle It’s an “adaptive” platform where teachers can set up free virtual classrooms (it looks like it’s free to individual teachers, but schools and districts can pay for more features) and is supposed to differentiate in English, Math and Social Studies content. "Freckle empowers teachers to differentiate instruction across Math, ELA, Social Studies and Science."
Teaching with Tolerance Educate children and youth to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to educators—teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioner,. to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants. The program emphasizes social justice and anti-bias.
Teaching for Change "Teaching for Change provides teachers and parents with the tools to create schools where students learn to read, write, and change the world. By drawing direct connections to real world issues, Teaching for Change encourages teachers and students to question and re-think the world inside and outside their classrooms, build a more equitable, multicultural society, and become active global citizens."
The Science Behind It, a project of the National Science Foundation, features questions on the issues people are curious about. It tells the story of why each topic is important and what current science tells us about it. Designed with everyday people in mind, the project highlights the ways science, engineering, and medicine touch our lives every day. For example, in response to the question, “Why do we need to encourage women in STEM?” students can read an article about the importance of women in science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine to our nation’s future and gain an understanding of the barriers women face in these fields. Visitors to the site can explore questions by topic (Space, Technology, Culture of Science, Cyber, Criminal Justice, Immigration, Security, Health, Climate Change, Biotech, Education, Energy), or they can take a quiz on a specific topic and check out the answers.
Teaching While White about the anxiety white teachers often feel while trying to teach about those difficult topics, especially to students of color.
NewsforKids is a free news site for kids that features a mix of age-appropriate, relevant, and timely articles for kids to enjoy. Multileveled Science News ArticlesScience in the News, published by Science A–Z, engages students in the ever-changing world of science. Each issue features compelling news stories for students written at three reading levels to allow for differentiated instruction.
News-2-You Weekly newspaper for beginning readers and special needs students.
Promoting civic engagement through children's literature
Three Ways to Explore the News Through Maps
Surging Seas interactive.Type in the name of any coastal location in the United States, and you’ll see what the future holds.
Student Daily News
Student News Daily provides current events materials for the high school classroom. Content categories include a Daily News Article and weekly World Events. Comprehension and critical thinking questions as well as background and resources are provided below the article.
Xyza is a news experience made just for elementary and middle school–aged children. Whether reading, watching, responding, or contributing, students get the opportunity to learn about the events that are occurring in the world right now. Xyza’s news stories cover politics, world events, entertainment, sports, arts, culture, science, technology, and more.
Here There Everywhere a news website/blog designed for elementary and older school-aged children. Its purpose is to show kids how they are connected to their world and introduce them to the people and events shaping it. It credits children with being interested in and being able to understand some of the more newsy topics (though there will be lots of the fun stuff, too!).’
Classroom Conversations with the World Looking for a way to engage your students with a global partner class in the context of your curriculum? That's exactly what our Classroom Conversations with the World program does!
Google News can search for news using categories such as Wold, Business, Sport, Science, Health…etc. They can also search for news on geographical area or in nearby places.
The World Day Against Child Labor – Here Are Related Teaching & Learning Resources
Crash Course Kids. This channel from the producers of Crash Course is updated every other week and covers elementary school science topics like animals, space exploration, oceanography and more
The United States Census Bureau has released “Statistics in Schools,” a free K–12 curriculum that features 20 lessons to help students understand why being counted in 2020 is important. The curriculum includes “Let’s Get the Count Right,” a 40-minute activity for K–2 that helps students learn how to count up to 100, make number comparisons, and understand the concept of populations; “Population Change over Time,” a 35-minute unit for grades 3 and 4 that helps students identify trends in data and make predictions based on data; “Diversity: Languages Spoken in the United States,” a 45-minute lesson for grades 5 and 6 to help students learn how to calculate percentages based on data and understand the concept of diversity;
Digital Explorer engages young people in global issues for a better future. Our unique projects provide inspirational lessons and resources direct from the world to your classroom.
See The Causes of Death Visually in Every Country GBD Compare is an impressive visualization of the causes of death in every country around the world.
Science News for Students is an online publication dedicated to providing age-appropriate, topical science news to learners, parents, and educators. SNS, which is free to use, helps to fulfill the Society’s mission by connecting the latest in scientific research to learning in and out of the classroom. Science News for Students publishes award-winning journalism on research across the breadth of science, health, and technology fields, with the aim to bring these new developments to a younger audience.
Dollar Street - Compare and contrast how people of various income levels live around the world.
Reach Out Reporter is a free service that provides science stories for elementary school students. The site is updated weekly with videos, articles, and graphics. There is a section in Reach Out Reporter called Fact Pack. In the fact pack section you will find sets of short videos and or images arranged around a central topic.
Youngzine a source of news, sports, and entertainment stories for elementary school students. It also now offer a classroom blogs feature. Youngzine classroom blogs enable teachers to create a private online space for their students to use to discuss news stories. As a teacher you can register your students on Youngzine and assign them to your classroom. Then within your Youngzine classroom you can assign articles for your students to read, ask them to response to articles and discussion prompts, and view their scores on the Youngzine weekly quiz.
The Why Files is a resource designed for students to learn about the science of stories in the news. The Why Files doesn't cover every current events news story, just the stories that have connections to science concepts.
It’s Okay To Be Smart. This PBS YouTube channel focuses on engaging science topics that appeal to kids, like the science of barbecue and the world of fire ants.
Physics Girl. Another fun YouTube channel from PBS, this channel explains physics by focusing on interesting phenomena, such as pool vortices, monster waves and crazy bouncing balls.
Storybots. This channel, offering animated music videos, is aimed at younger kids, but even older students will smile at rapping planets and singing dinosaurs. The songs are a fun way to reinforce content.
Listen and Read is a set of 15 nonfiction read-along stories. The stories feature pictures and short passages of text that students can read on their own or have read to them by each story's narrator. The collection of stories is divided into three categories: Community Club which would be better described as "careers," animals, and the President.
The Whiz Times
a news site designed for kids. The site features a wide array of news stories covering everything from serious stories about things like Edward Snowden seeking asylum in Russia to lighter stories about things like panda bears and kittens. Students and teachers can browse through The Whiz Times by selecting a news category and or an age level. In addition to the articles, The Whiz Times has a fairly sizable collection of educational videos (most hosted on YouTube).
News in Levels offers news stories that are on the lighter side of things. The stories are available in three versions so that you can choose the version that is appropriate for your students. The stories include a list of potentially difficult words along with definitions of those words. Each story is also accompanied by a video.
22 Amazing Visualizations and Maps about World Facts and cultures
SciShow and SciShowKids. These channels are produced by the same folks who make Crash Course. Each video deals with a scientific topic in an interesting and engaging way. Some topics, like the science of beer and wine, are not suitable for kids.
The Learning Network gr. 3-12
Investigate the daily news . The site from the New York Times offers grade appropriate analysis of current events and articles, quizzes, and lesson plans. The Learning Network You’ll find writing prompts, contests and multimedia resources on this website.
Smithsonian Tween Tribune has a collection of articles perfect for elementary and middle school students. You can easily access sports stories, national news, and more on their site. With a free login teachers can find Lexile levels for each articles in addition to lesson plans and quiz questions for students.
PBS NewsHour Extra is a good site for middle school and high school students. The site offers a searchable database of articles. A searchable database of lesson plans is also available on PBS NewsHour Extra. ( www.freetech4teachers.com)
Teaching Kids News
a news site developed for use in elementary school and middle school classrooms. Teaching Kids News features timely and relevant news stories written on a level that students can comprehend. Each article is accompanied by a set of discussion questions, writing prompts, reading prompts, and vocabulary words.
DOGO News Search by category and grade level (3-8). Guiding questions. The teacher account lets you create classes, reading lists. lesson plans, and moderated social interaction.
Go Go News
a news website designed for elementary school students. The site features many short news stories that can be read and listened to. The stories that Go Go News covers aren't hard, breaking news stories. The stories are more of a interesting and educational nature.
Scholastic News. This website is for finding high quality informational texts about current events. Each article contains nonfiction text features including captions, maps, sections headings and more. It’s a great resource for connecting current events issues to English Language Arts instruction or extending a lesson in the content areas.
Time for Kids- Resources are organized by topic and grade levels. Topics include arts, animals, books, culture, earth science, engineering, environment, among others. There are four grade categories: Grades K-1 articles, Grades 2 articles, Grades 3-4 articles, and Grades 5-6 articles.
KidsPost is a current events website which features games, news, contests, puzzles, and fun activities. The articles relate to elementary - middle school range of students. Once a site user clicks on an article, the readability is appropriate for middle elementary aged students. Children will also find the photography area interesting since the captions underneath are written as mini-stories. For those students who are looking for reading recommendations, this section of the website is extremely helpful.
Topics Online Magazine gr 4-8
With the current issue and extensive archives, this online magazine offers colorful articles and a variety of photographs of the countries our new English learners come from. The magazine includes interesting topics such as food, travel, globalization, international stories, movie reviews from the international perspective, biographies by international students and students of American ethnicities, and shopping tips.
Newsround - BBC News for Kids gr. 3-6
This highly-participatory, attractive world news site for kids lets children select all the normal news features like tv/movies, music, weather, sports, animals, sci/tech etc.
Weekly Reader Feature Zone gr. 3-5
This site asks “What's New in the World?” every week and has materials and activities for students, parents, teachers, and families.
National Geographic Kids News gr. 3-6
Kids News highlights news, features, and science articles on subjects of interest to kids. Sites for teachers and parents include lesson plans and teaching materials.
Current Events Assignment Template Level1 | Level 2
News2you is a newspaper for students with autism and other disabilities that's available on the web. News2you incorporates the symbol system SymbolStix (also used in Proloquo2Go), along with voice narration.
The Week in Pictures displays a small collection of photographs from around the world. The pictures capture a mix of serious news stories and lighter cultural stories. The Week in Pictures collections are part of a much larger resource from the BBC simply called In Pictures. The In Pictures resource provides hundreds of images in a variety collections and slideshows about current events throughout the world. Some of the slide shows even include narration. All of the images include captions explaining what is happening in the picture and a little background knowledge about the event being photographed.www.freetech4teachers.com
Teaching Elementary Students About the Concept of Injustice
List of children’s books that explore race and racism
Freckle It’s an “adaptive” platform where teachers can set up free virtual classrooms (it looks like it’s free to individual teachers, but schools and districts can pay for more features) and is supposed to differentiate in English, Math and Social Studies content. "Freckle empowers teachers to differentiate instruction across Math, ELA, Social Studies and Science."
Teaching with Tolerance Educate children and youth to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to educators—teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioner,. to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants. The program emphasizes social justice and anti-bias.
Teaching for Change "Teaching for Change provides teachers and parents with the tools to create schools where students learn to read, write, and change the world. By drawing direct connections to real world issues, Teaching for Change encourages teachers and students to question and re-think the world inside and outside their classrooms, build a more equitable, multicultural society, and become active global citizens."
The Science Behind It, a project of the National Science Foundation, features questions on the issues people are curious about. It tells the story of why each topic is important and what current science tells us about it. Designed with everyday people in mind, the project highlights the ways science, engineering, and medicine touch our lives every day. For example, in response to the question, “Why do we need to encourage women in STEM?” students can read an article about the importance of women in science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine to our nation’s future and gain an understanding of the barriers women face in these fields. Visitors to the site can explore questions by topic (Space, Technology, Culture of Science, Cyber, Criminal Justice, Immigration, Security, Health, Climate Change, Biotech, Education, Energy), or they can take a quiz on a specific topic and check out the answers.
Teaching While White about the anxiety white teachers often feel while trying to teach about those difficult topics, especially to students of color.
NewsforKids is a free news site for kids that features a mix of age-appropriate, relevant, and timely articles for kids to enjoy. Multileveled Science News ArticlesScience in the News, published by Science A–Z, engages students in the ever-changing world of science. Each issue features compelling news stories for students written at three reading levels to allow for differentiated instruction.
News-2-You Weekly newspaper for beginning readers and special needs students.
Promoting civic engagement through children's literature
Three Ways to Explore the News Through Maps
- Newspaper Map is a neat tool for locating and reading newspapers from locations all around the world. Newspaper Map claims to have geolocated 10,000 newspapers. To find a newspaper you can browse the map then click on a placemark to open the link within to read a newspaper. You can also locate newspapers by using the search boxes to locate a newspaper by title or location. Along with links to the newspapers, Newspapers Map provides links to translate the newspapers you find on the map.
- Unfiltered News is a new site that uses an interactive cartogram to help you find trending news stories from around the world. To find stories through Unfiltered News simply open the website and click on a topic listed within one of the circles on the map. Once you've made a selection a list of stories will appear on the right side of your screen. Click on a story to read it in full. From the menu on the right side of the screen you can choose a different location and a new list of stories will appear.
- The U.S. News Map is a great resource produced by Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia. The U.S. New Map is an archive of American newspapers printed between 1836 and 1925. You can search the archive by entering a keyword or phrase. The results of your search will be displayed on an interactive map. Click on any of the markers on the map and you'll be shown a list of newspaper articles related to your search term. Click on a listed article to read it on the Library of Congress' Chronicling America website.
Surging Seas interactive.Type in the name of any coastal location in the United States, and you’ll see what the future holds.
Student Daily News
Student News Daily provides current events materials for the high school classroom. Content categories include a Daily News Article and weekly World Events. Comprehension and critical thinking questions as well as background and resources are provided below the article.
Xyza is a news experience made just for elementary and middle school–aged children. Whether reading, watching, responding, or contributing, students get the opportunity to learn about the events that are occurring in the world right now. Xyza’s news stories cover politics, world events, entertainment, sports, arts, culture, science, technology, and more.
Here There Everywhere a news website/blog designed for elementary and older school-aged children. Its purpose is to show kids how they are connected to their world and introduce them to the people and events shaping it. It credits children with being interested in and being able to understand some of the more newsy topics (though there will be lots of the fun stuff, too!).’
Classroom Conversations with the World Looking for a way to engage your students with a global partner class in the context of your curriculum? That's exactly what our Classroom Conversations with the World program does!
Google News can search for news using categories such as Wold, Business, Sport, Science, Health…etc. They can also search for news on geographical area or in nearby places.
The World Day Against Child Labor – Here Are Related Teaching & Learning Resources
Crash Course Kids. This channel from the producers of Crash Course is updated every other week and covers elementary school science topics like animals, space exploration, oceanography and more
The United States Census Bureau has released “Statistics in Schools,” a free K–12 curriculum that features 20 lessons to help students understand why being counted in 2020 is important. The curriculum includes “Let’s Get the Count Right,” a 40-minute activity for K–2 that helps students learn how to count up to 100, make number comparisons, and understand the concept of populations; “Population Change over Time,” a 35-minute unit for grades 3 and 4 that helps students identify trends in data and make predictions based on data; “Diversity: Languages Spoken in the United States,” a 45-minute lesson for grades 5 and 6 to help students learn how to calculate percentages based on data and understand the concept of diversity;
Digital Explorer engages young people in global issues for a better future. Our unique projects provide inspirational lessons and resources direct from the world to your classroom.
See The Causes of Death Visually in Every Country GBD Compare is an impressive visualization of the causes of death in every country around the world.
Science News for Students is an online publication dedicated to providing age-appropriate, topical science news to learners, parents, and educators. SNS, which is free to use, helps to fulfill the Society’s mission by connecting the latest in scientific research to learning in and out of the classroom. Science News for Students publishes award-winning journalism on research across the breadth of science, health, and technology fields, with the aim to bring these new developments to a younger audience.
Dollar Street - Compare and contrast how people of various income levels live around the world.
Reach Out Reporter is a free service that provides science stories for elementary school students. The site is updated weekly with videos, articles, and graphics. There is a section in Reach Out Reporter called Fact Pack. In the fact pack section you will find sets of short videos and or images arranged around a central topic.
Youngzine a source of news, sports, and entertainment stories for elementary school students. It also now offer a classroom blogs feature. Youngzine classroom blogs enable teachers to create a private online space for their students to use to discuss news stories. As a teacher you can register your students on Youngzine and assign them to your classroom. Then within your Youngzine classroom you can assign articles for your students to read, ask them to response to articles and discussion prompts, and view their scores on the Youngzine weekly quiz.
The Why Files is a resource designed for students to learn about the science of stories in the news. The Why Files doesn't cover every current events news story, just the stories that have connections to science concepts.
It’s Okay To Be Smart. This PBS YouTube channel focuses on engaging science topics that appeal to kids, like the science of barbecue and the world of fire ants.
Physics Girl. Another fun YouTube channel from PBS, this channel explains physics by focusing on interesting phenomena, such as pool vortices, monster waves and crazy bouncing balls.
Storybots. This channel, offering animated music videos, is aimed at younger kids, but even older students will smile at rapping planets and singing dinosaurs. The songs are a fun way to reinforce content.
Listen and Read is a set of 15 nonfiction read-along stories. The stories feature pictures and short passages of text that students can read on their own or have read to them by each story's narrator. The collection of stories is divided into three categories: Community Club which would be better described as "careers," animals, and the President.
The Whiz Times
a news site designed for kids. The site features a wide array of news stories covering everything from serious stories about things like Edward Snowden seeking asylum in Russia to lighter stories about things like panda bears and kittens. Students and teachers can browse through The Whiz Times by selecting a news category and or an age level. In addition to the articles, The Whiz Times has a fairly sizable collection of educational videos (most hosted on YouTube).
News in Levels offers news stories that are on the lighter side of things. The stories are available in three versions so that you can choose the version that is appropriate for your students. The stories include a list of potentially difficult words along with definitions of those words. Each story is also accompanied by a video.
22 Amazing Visualizations and Maps about World Facts and cultures
SciShow and SciShowKids. These channels are produced by the same folks who make Crash Course. Each video deals with a scientific topic in an interesting and engaging way. Some topics, like the science of beer and wine, are not suitable for kids.
The Learning Network gr. 3-12
Investigate the daily news . The site from the New York Times offers grade appropriate analysis of current events and articles, quizzes, and lesson plans. The Learning Network You’ll find writing prompts, contests and multimedia resources on this website.
Smithsonian Tween Tribune has a collection of articles perfect for elementary and middle school students. You can easily access sports stories, national news, and more on their site. With a free login teachers can find Lexile levels for each articles in addition to lesson plans and quiz questions for students.
PBS NewsHour Extra is a good site for middle school and high school students. The site offers a searchable database of articles. A searchable database of lesson plans is also available on PBS NewsHour Extra. ( www.freetech4teachers.com)
Teaching Kids News
a news site developed for use in elementary school and middle school classrooms. Teaching Kids News features timely and relevant news stories written on a level that students can comprehend. Each article is accompanied by a set of discussion questions, writing prompts, reading prompts, and vocabulary words.
DOGO News Search by category and grade level (3-8). Guiding questions. The teacher account lets you create classes, reading lists. lesson plans, and moderated social interaction.
Go Go News
a news website designed for elementary school students. The site features many short news stories that can be read and listened to. The stories that Go Go News covers aren't hard, breaking news stories. The stories are more of a interesting and educational nature.
Scholastic News. This website is for finding high quality informational texts about current events. Each article contains nonfiction text features including captions, maps, sections headings and more. It’s a great resource for connecting current events issues to English Language Arts instruction or extending a lesson in the content areas.
- IFTTT is a service that lets you create powerful connections with one simple statement: If This Then That
Time for Kids- Resources are organized by topic and grade levels. Topics include arts, animals, books, culture, earth science, engineering, environment, among others. There are four grade categories: Grades K-1 articles, Grades 2 articles, Grades 3-4 articles, and Grades 5-6 articles.
KidsPost is a current events website which features games, news, contests, puzzles, and fun activities. The articles relate to elementary - middle school range of students. Once a site user clicks on an article, the readability is appropriate for middle elementary aged students. Children will also find the photography area interesting since the captions underneath are written as mini-stories. For those students who are looking for reading recommendations, this section of the website is extremely helpful.
Topics Online Magazine gr 4-8
With the current issue and extensive archives, this online magazine offers colorful articles and a variety of photographs of the countries our new English learners come from. The magazine includes interesting topics such as food, travel, globalization, international stories, movie reviews from the international perspective, biographies by international students and students of American ethnicities, and shopping tips.
Newsround - BBC News for Kids gr. 3-6
This highly-participatory, attractive world news site for kids lets children select all the normal news features like tv/movies, music, weather, sports, animals, sci/tech etc.
Weekly Reader Feature Zone gr. 3-5
This site asks “What's New in the World?” every week and has materials and activities for students, parents, teachers, and families.
National Geographic Kids News gr. 3-6
Kids News highlights news, features, and science articles on subjects of interest to kids. Sites for teachers and parents include lesson plans and teaching materials.
Middle - High School
Classroom Conversations with the World Looking for a way to engage your students with a global partner class in the context of your curriculum? That's exactly what our Classroom Conversations with the World program does! HuffPost Teens The popular Huffington Post has this special section where it features news specifically for a young audience.
The Largest Risks Faced by the World
Current Events Assignment Template Level1 | Level 2
middle school lesson plan aligned to NGSS standards. Students explore the characteristics of science and pseudoscience.
History Discussion Prompts for All 50 States a collection of video clips and "bell ringers" for every state in the United States. Bell Ringers are short video clips that are accompanied by discussion questions to start a lesson. the clips and bell ringers cover a wide array of topics related to each state. For example, the collection of Maine resources includes a video of top policy issues according to former governor Paul LePage, the Missouri Compromise, and the removal of a dam on the Kennebec River. The collection of resources about Iowa includes a bell ringer about the history of the Iowa caucuses, a bell ringer about African American migration to Iowa, and a lesson plan about the Louisiana Purchase. www.freetech4teachers.comGerrymandering 101 Limit voting rights in 3 easy steps. (And how to teach your students about it.)
Teaching Tools to Support a Global ClassroomWorld Savvy works with educators to make classrooms more inclusive, relevant, and engaging. The organization’s standards-aligned educational resources, curriculum, and teaching tools support the integration of global competence into teaching and learning. All content is free and accessible to anyone interested in globalizing their classroom or learning environment. A library of resources includes case studies (student-inquiry approach), knowledge-to-action (design thinking), multilingual learner toolkit, and student projects.
The Global News Project This is a multimedia platforms that employs the power of digital storytelling to explore and investigate key concepts and issues related to various aspects of our world. The Global News Project features films, documentaries, photo essays, and essays that shed light on issues related to environment, culture, and social diversity.
What’s the best country to live in? TED-Ed has a new interesting video and lesson – here’s how they describe it: Discover the shortcomings of using GDP to measure a country’s well-being, and what alternatives can be used to gauge quality of life.
A Good Source of U.S. History Lesson Starters Starting classroom conversations about a new topic or unit is a way to give students an interesting image or a short primary source document to review and ask questions about. A great place to find those conversation starters is the National Archive's Today's Document website. Every day Today's Document features a new image or document from the archives. The documents and images are from that day in history. Each one is accompanied by some additional research links and lesson plan resources. This short video I provides an overview of Today's Document and the related resources that it provides for U.S. History teachers. www.freetech4teachers.comThe Week in Pictures displays a small collection of photographs from around the world. The pictures capture a mix of serious news stories and lighter cultural stories. The Week in Pictures collections are part of a much larger resource from the BBC simply called In Pictures. The In Pictures resource provides hundreds of images in a variety collections and slideshows about current events throughout the world. Some of the slide shows even include narration. All of the images include captions explaining what is happening in the picture and a little background knowledge about the event being photographed. The following video I demonstrate how students can refine search results according to publication date. www.freetech4teachers.com
Dollar Street, a project created by Gapminder, sent teams of photographers around the world to take photos of over 264 homes in 50 different countries and uploaded them onto the website, allowing us to see how different people live across the world at different income points. The project imagines the world as a street ordered by income…poor families live at one end and rich families live at the other. A team of photographers went out and photographed the everyday items owned by families of all income levels — shoes, toothbrushes, TVs, beds, lights, sinks — so that visitors to the site can see how much income affects how families live.
Metroverse is an urban economy navigator built at the Growth Lab at Harvard University. It is based on over a decade of research on how economies grow and diversify and offers a detailed look into the specialization patterns of cities. As a dynamic resource, the tool is continually evolving with new data and features to help answer questions such as What is the economic composition of my city?How does my city compare to cities around the globe? Which cities look most like mine? What are the technological capabilities that underpin my city’s current economy? Which growth and diversification paths does that suggest for the future?
Disrupt Texts is a crowdsourced, grass roots effort by teachers for teachers to challenge the traditional canon in order to create a more inclusive, representative, and equitable language arts curriculum that our students deserve.
Population.IO - This interactive site lets you put in your age and country to explore how you fit into the world's population, and compare between different countries and times in history.
Naraview is a site on which you can create challenges for you students to connect topics through Wikipedia. The idea is that you give your students two topics and they have to click through Wikipedia articles to make the connections between the two topics. As the teacher, I can see the paths that students take to get from the starting article to the ending article. Here's an example of how Naraview works. www.freetech4teachers.com
World101 I Modules on the Issues, Forces, and Actors That Shape Our World The renewed focus on civics education in this country provides a promising path for readying students for the challenges of twenty-first century citizenship. The Council on Foreign Relations has created a free curriculum to facilitate this critical work. Educators are invited to explore the library of curriculum units —Global Era Issues; Regions of the World; and How the World Works—and Sometimes Doesn’t.
21 Sites For Short & Accessible Video “Explainers” About Current Events
New PBS NewsHour Video Segment: “Past pandemics have reshaped society. Will coronavirus do the same?”
The Learning Network gr. 3-12
Investigate the daily news . The site from the New York Times offers grade appropriate analysis of current events and articles, quizzes, and lesson plans. The Learning Network You’ll find writing prompts, contests and multimedia resources on this website.
U.S. News Map produced by Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia offers another interesting way to encourage students to explore digital archives. The U.S. News Map is based on the Chronicling America newspaper collection hosted by the Library of Congress. When you search on the U.S. News Map the results of your search will be displayed on an interactive map. Clicking on a placemarker the map will take you to a list of articles from newspapers in the area around the placemarker. You can then select an article from the list and read it on the Chronicling America website www.freetech4teachers.com
Why poor people make poor decisions is an insightful good article giving a review of that research, and it’s unfortunate that it has a terrible headline. No, not all poor people make poor decisions and, in fact, often make very rational decisions that are only perceived by some not in poverty as “poor” ones. But it is clear that economic pressures do have a negative impact on “cognitive bandwidth” that could ordinarily be devoted to to more reflection and planning.
The Best Visualizations Of Poverty In The U.S. & Around The World
The Best Resources About Wealth & Income Inequality
Global wealth, despite accounting for just 11.8 percent of the adult population. The base of the pyramid is the most poignant, and it shows how 2.8 billion people (53.2 percent of the world's population) share a combined wealth of $5 trillion - which is just 1.1 percent of total global wealth.
The Best Resources On Why Improving Education Is Not THE Answer To Poverty & Inequality
The Best Articles Showing Why Education Reform Is NOT The Best Way To Fight Poverty
StoryMapJS is a web-based digital tool for designing stories that make significant use of maps. It was designed for journalists but can be adapted for classroom use. In terms of project possibilities, students could create journeys, travel guides, historical fiction, nonfiction, news stories -- pretty much anything that relies on or benefits from maps. Creating a story is kind of like a hybrid of a slideshow and an interactive map. Students string together a series of slides where they can add text and then link map locations, images, and video to support the story.
Do Politics Make Us Irrational? explains the results of 2013 study about how politics can affect other parts of our decision making processes. Watch all the way through the lesson and you'll learn that it might not be just politics but any other deeply held allegiance that can cause us to make decisions that might be a little bit irrational. The lesson is made relatable to students through the us of an analogy between politics and sports. Watch the lesson as embedded below and find some good discussion questions here. www.freetech4teachers.com
Graphs to Help Students Think About Growing Inequalities in AmericaTo help students think critically about American society, The New York Times has compiled 28 graphs covering topics such as healthcare, education, and income. Among the graphs are examples that show how the coronavirus pandemic complicated the inequalities deeply entrenched in our society, as well as laid bare and widened these disparities. The Times has created a lesson plan to support teachers in guiding individual students or whole classes
Bad News is a website that offers simulations that show visitors how misinformation is spread through social media. Bad News is available in two versions. The regular version is intended for those who are high school age or older. Bad News Junior is appropriate for middle school and older elementary school students. www.freetech4teachers.com
Can You Spot the Problem With These Headlines? is a TED-Ed lesson that walks students through the dissection of a couple of hypothetical news headlines. By watching the video students can begin to understand how headlines are written to entice readers and how misleading headlines are created.
The Science Behind It, a project of the National Science Foundation, features questions on the issues people are curious about. It tells the story of why each topic is important and what current science tells us about it. Designed with everyday people in mind, the project highlights the ways science, engineering, and medicine touch our lives every day. For example, in response to the question, “Why do we need to encourage women in STEM?” students can read an article about the importance of women in science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine to our nation’s future and gain an understanding of the barriers women face in these fields. Visitors to the site can explore questions by topic (Space, Technology, Culture of Science, Cyber, Criminal Justice, Immigration, Security, Health, Climate Change, Biotech, Education, Energy), or they can take a quiz on a specific topic and check out the answers.
Math in the Media program from the American Mathematical Society (AMS), teachers can stay up-to-date with math in current events and get ideas for classroom activities. The site has two components: Digests of Math in the Media and Tony Phillips’ Take on Math in the Media. Every month AMS publishes a set of digests of recent news stories involving math. Each digest consists of a summary of the news story accompanied by classroom activities that will help students practice the math concepts discussed in the news. Tony Phillips’ monthly columns take a deeper dive into recent developments in the world of mathematics as reflected in the press and in nonmathematical journals.
Other Protests Flare and Fade. Why This Movement Already Seems Different
The Best Sites For Learning About Protests In History:
What Protests Can Do is from Five Thirty Eight.
Protests are a U.S. tradition, leading the way for social change since the country's founding CBS video
Three Ways to Explore the News Through Maps
Write for Rights introduces students to human rights by writing letters to help 10 real young people around the world who are at risk just for their peaceful human rights activism. By participating in Write for Rights, students develop effective writing skills and experience firsthand the power of their words to make a difference. Students’ letters are actually delivered to the people who have the power to positively influence each case.
“After Parkland” is a new documentary about that terrible school shooting. Here’s a clip about it from ABC News, and you can read more about it here. You might also be interested in Not Very “Best” Lists Of The Week: Gun Violence.
Video: “Who pays the lowest taxes in the US?”
The NO Project is an award-winning, global, educational anti-slavery campaign that specifically targets youth awareness of modern slavery and human trafficking through film, music, art, dance, theatre, journalism, creative writing, education and social media. video tutorial
The Best Resources For Learning About Human Trafficking Today.
The Human Slavery Map is from Google Maps Mania.
Can reparations help right the wrongs of slavery?
Resources on the History of Policing and Today's Calls for Reform
Get vetted resources to help students learn more about policing in the United States, its historical roots in slavery and the Industrial Revolution, and the connections between today’s protests and longstanding efforts to reform law enforcement.
Teaching While White about the anxiety white teachers often feel while trying to teach about those difficult topics, especially to students of color.
Youngzine With new articles each week, Youngzine is a resource for texts to share with students. On this current events website you can find articles under science, technology and history categories. There are often maps, related resources and videos to explore with each article
CNN 10 CNN’s website provides quick ten-minute video clips for students featuring a wide variety of news stories. These commercial-free videos are perfect for sharing with students for daily updates. You might also decide to use these videos in a flipped classroom model for students to watch outside of the classroom and come back to class ready to discuss.
NBC Learn search for relevant content by standards. “The videos and primary resources are all from NBC News programs, and many of them provide additional teaching resources.
DOGOnews a next-generation online network empowering kids to engage with digital media in a fun, safe and social environment. News section has current events and news from all around the world. Written for and in some cases by children. The Maps section is an interactive way for younger readers to read news headlines geotagged on a world map. Learn about the world and see where it’s happening. Alao, teachers can set up their own DOGONews page and create a very personalized learning experience for their kids.
PBS NewsHour Extra is a good site for middle school and high school students. The site offers a searchable database of articles. A searchable database of lesson plans is also available on PBS NewsHour Extra. www.freetech4teachers.com
Teaching with Tolerance Educate children and youth to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to educators—teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioner,. to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants. The program emphasizes social justice and anti-bias.
Model Diplomacy Students become foreign policy experts in this real-world simulationThis impressive program has ready-to-use and expert-vetted content that'll help advanced students engage meaningfully with foreign policy issues and processes.
Teaching for Change "Teaching for Change provides teachers and parents with the tools to create schools where students learn to read, write, and change the world. By drawing direct connections to real world issues, Teaching for Change encourages teachers and students to question and re-think the world inside and outside their classrooms, build a more equitable, multicultural society, and become active global citizens."
Civic Online Reasoning, Here’s how they describe themselves.: Students are confused about how to evaluate online information. We all are. The new Civic Online Reasoning (COR) curriculum, developed by the Stanford History Education Group, provides free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world
The Week’s Classroom Education Program. This independent news source covers current events, arts, science, government, business and more. With a wide range of topics, it provides coverage in areas you may highlight alongside social studies or English Language Arts strategies.
World101, a program of the Council on Foreign Relations, offers a growing library of free multimedia resources that explain international affairs and foreign policy issues, helping students understand the basics of these topics, including why they matter and how they are relevant. Under Global Era Issues, educators will find ten modules that explore Globalism, Terrorism, Nuclear Proliferation, Climate Change, Migration, Cyberspace and Cybersecurity, Global Health, Trade, Monetary Policy and Currencies, and Development. Regions of the World presents six modules covering the Americas, Europe, Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, South and Central Asia, and East Asia and the Pacific. From essays and discussion questions to glossaries and up-to-date reading lists, World101 provides comprehensive teaching resources for each module.
Freckle It’s an “adaptive” platform where teachers can set up free virtual classrooms (it looks like it’s free to individual teachers, but schools and districts can pay for more features) and is supposed to differentiate in English, Math and Social Studies content. "Freckle empowers teachers to differentiate instruction across Math, ELA, Social Studies and Science."
Promoting civic engagement through children's literature
Becoming US
The Smithsonian Releases Curriculum On U.S. Migration & Immigration History Units of case studies are Borderlands: Mexican American War, Indian Boarding Schools, and Mexico; Education" Desegregation, Busing and Re-Segregation; Policy: Chinese Exclusion Act, DACA and Hart-Cellar Act; Belonging: Mexican Repatriation, Japanese Incarceration, and Islamophobia; Resistance: Stono Rebellion, Native Resistance, and Imokalee
NY Times Seven Unit writing Program a seven-unit writing curriculum. They describe it as “A flexible program for middle and high schools based on the real-world writing found in newspapers, from editorials and reviews to personal narratives and analysis essays.”
Immigration Issues
The Best Practical Resources For Helping Teachers, Students & Families Respond To Immigration Challenges)
Story-based Game on the Aftermath of a Hurricane Community in Crisis is a story-based literacy game in which students take on the role of director of a community center dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane. In that role, students will need to work with their staff to prioritize relief efforts to best serve individuals and the community as a whole. They must talk with staff and citizens, keep an eye on their to-do list for problems to solve, and decide which actions to initiate. An in-game cellphone features the to-do list, messages from characters, a glossary, and a notepad. The game includes 12 episodes, which take 20 to 30 minutes each. Students visit various locations, click on hot spots, and engage in dialogue with characters or complete tasks.
Syrian Journey: Choose Your Own Escape Route helps students to understand the real dilemmas that Syrian refugees face. This journey is based on extensive research and real stories of Syrians who have made the trek. Syrian Journey is a playable blog post with threaded endings. When they play Syrian Journey, students take notes on the decisions and choices made, and describe the difficulties and challenges faced. As Syrian refugees, students decide whether to deal with smugglers or take a dangerous raft ride across the Mediterranean Sea. The culminating activity involves the creation of a student journal that includes where, as refugees, they are headed and whether asylum is granted. It includes all the push and pull factors of immigration.
Space for Respectful Discourse Around Civics-Related IssuesYouth Nation was created by Rutgers University’s Social–Emotional and Character Development (SECD) Lab for adolescents to exercise political expression and hear from other youth around the country. Free downloadable curricula orient teachers to Youth Nation and suggest ways to use the website in the classroom. An introductory lesson guides students in navigating the website.The website is intended to show students how they can push their limits and understand themselves through thoughtful stories. It is also intended for students to find stories that inspire them. They can learn what other young people care about and weigh in on issues occurring around them. Adolescents can interact on the site by commenting on articles or submitting ideas for posts as an activity for current events, for clubs in school, or as part of out-of-school programs. Members of the SECD Lab approve all content. Youth can also browse the activities of the month, which include games and art projects to do at home or in the classroom. Recent posts include “Talking to your ‘angry relative’ over the holidays: A guide”; “McCarthyism: blocking democratic freedoms in the 1950s”; “Why does voting matter? A quick explanation”; and “Science literacy informs the democratic process.” New posts are added monthly; old posts are archived, yet still accessible.
Which Voting System is Best? TEDed video
Gerrymandering: How drawing jagged lines can impact an election The US is the only democracy thta does not have an independent committee to draw congressional districts.
Gerrymandering Explained Video
Does your vote count? The Electoral College explained video
Surging Seas interactive.Type in the name of any coastal location in the United States, and you’ll see what the future holds.
“WHICH COUNTRIES WILL HOLD THE POWER IN 20 YEARS’ TIME?”
The United States Census Bureau has released “Statistics in Schools,” a free K–12 curriculum that features 20 lessons to help students understand why being counted in 2020 is important. The curriculum includes “Appointment,” a 35-minute study for grades 7 and 8 on how to use, analyze, and interpret data; and “Make Data Speak,” a 40-minute unit for grades 9–12 on how to collect and interpret data, and display the information in a visually creative way. Nearly every lesson concludes with objectives that help students connect the census count to distribution of resources within communities.
The Week’s Classroom Education Program. High School This independent news source covers current events, arts, science, government, business and more. With a wide range of topics, it provides coverage in areas you may highlight alongside social studies or English Language Arts strategies.
Xyza is a news experience made just for elementary and middle school–aged children. Whether reading, watching, responding, or contributing, students get the opportunity to learn about the events that are occurring in the world right now. Xyza’s news stories cover politics, world events, entertainment, sports, arts, culture, science, technology, and more.
Here There Everywhere a news website/blog designed for elementary and older school-aged children. Its purpose is to show kids how they are connected to their world and introduce them to the people and events shaping it. It credits children with being interested in and being able to understand some of the more newsy topics (though there will be lots of the fun stuff, too!).
How economic inequality might affect a society's well-being
Google News can search for news using categories such as Wold, Business, Sport, Science, Health…etc. They can also search for news on geographical area or in nearby places.
The World Day Against Child Labor – Here Are Related Teaching & Learning Resources
Issues Viewed Through the Lens of the US Presidency
The Miller Center at University of Virginia offers a free teacher- and student-friendly collection of resources that are about all of the US presidents and key public issues of each period. Each president’s page includes carefully crafted essays by experts, quick facts, presidential speeches, interviews with scholars, relevant publications, and more. Students can read detailed content about the presidents’ lives before they came into office, their campaigns, the domestic and foreign issues they faced during their administrations, and their lasting legacy on American history. For example, a 12-minute video about a current controversial issue, “Race And The Crisis of Justice,” looks at the history of race, policing, and incarceration in the United States through the lens of the presidency.
Teaching Civics website – a place with over 800 lesson plans. They also have some handy ed resources.
Current Special Projects: Understanding World Events - gr. 6-12
Maintained by Educators for Social Responsibility, a nonprofit organization founded in 1982, whose mission is "to make teaching social responsibility a core practice in education." This particular page focuses on helping young people cope with and understand global issues and crisis events. It consists of teaching resources, lessons, guides, sponsored events, and lists of best-of-Web links. Topics addressed include Current Events Lessons, Dealing with Crises, Understanding War, and Countering Discrimination.
"To Fix Fake News Look to Yellow Journalism"
Examples for Teaching with Fake News and Pseudoscience
7 websites to teach fake news
Listenwise ( gr. 6 - 12) makes it easy to bring authentic voices and compelling non-fiction stories to the classroom. Teach your students to Listen with the Power of Public Radio. Curates the best of public radio to keep teaching connected to the real world and build student listening skills at the same time.
Lynching In America. Google has supported the development of a brand-new site created by the Equal Justice Initiative. It includes multi-media resources and maps, along with discussions on how it relates to criminal justice today.
Digital Explorer engages young people in global issues for a better future. Our unique projects provide inspirational lessons and resources direct from the world to your classroom.
Science News for Students is an online publication dedicated to providing age-appropriate, topical science news to learners, parents, and educators. SNS, which is free to use, helps to fulfill the Society’s mission by connecting the latest in scientific research to learning in and out of the classroom. Science News for Students publishes award-winning journalism on research across the breadth of science, health, and technology fields, with the aim to bring these new developments to a younger audience.
Global Student Laboratory is a web-based, educational platform that enables students, teachers, and learners of all ages to pose questions and together find answers. With GlobalLab, teachers have, in one place, all the resources, tools, partners, and support to bring authentic investigations to classrooms and homes. Each project is a collaborative journey of challenges and discovery. In nine projects, step by step, students use math, graphing, and more to discover who they are as a community.
Newspaper Map for locating and reading newspapers from locations all around the world. Newspaper Map claims to have put placemarks for more 10,000 newspapers on one Google Map. To find a newspaper you can browse the map then click on a placemark to open the link within to read a newspaper. You can also locate newspapers by using the search boxes to locate a newspaper by title or location. Along with links to the newspapers, Newspapers Map provides links to translate the newspapers you find on the map.
The Best Online Tools To See Newspapers From Around The World
Penpal Schools gives students from different backgrounds and countries the opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue about hot-button issues, such as immigration and health care. In one instance, students from the “Rust Belt” had an open, respectful conversation with students from immigrant families. The program usually conducted over six weeks. Each student is matched with a penpal and given standards-aligned topics to write to their pal about. Teachers can choose from umbrella topics such as World Explorer and World News, and they can review and grade students’ work. Penpal Schools is offered at no charge to those who can’t pay.
The Why Files (gr. 5 - 8) is a resource designed for students to learn about the science of stories in the news. The Why Files doesn't cover every current events news story, just the stories that have connections to science concepts.
The Uprooted is a useful interactive map demonstrating the extent of today’s world refugee crisis.
SciShow and SciShowKids. These channels are produced by the same folks who make Crash Course. Each video deals with a scientific topic in an interesting and engaging way. Some topics, like the science of beer and wine, are not suitable for kids.
Suppression Trail, The New York Times has created a great learning “game” to help people understand the difficulties many face when they want to vote in the United States. Check out “The Voter Suppression Trail,” done in the style of the classic Oregon Trail game.
Euronews News articles from around the world. Can search by different languages.
ListenCurrent makes it easy to bring authentic voices and compelling non-fiction Public Radio stories to the classroom. Vetted for the best of public radio to keep teaching connected to the real world and build student listening skills at the same time. Includes questions and discussion themes in the free version.
Mapstory News from around the world with pin options. You can also use mapstories created by others.
ProCon non-profit organization promotes critical thinking, education, and informed citizenship by presenting controversial issues in a straightforward, nonpartisan, and primarily pro/con format. The subject groups include politics, science and technology, elections and presidents, world/international issues, health and medicine, entertainment and sports, and much more. The Teachers’ Corner provides free lesson plans, a section on how teachers can meet Common Core and NCSS standards as they use ProCon materials, and a section on teaching controversial issues and critical thinking. The topics range from “Minimum Wage” to “Illegal Immigration”; from “Tablets vs Textbooks” to “Video Games and Violence.”
Terrorism - Questions and Answers Grades 6 to 12
This regularly-updated site strives to provide straightforward information in a "what we do know; what we don't know..." format. The breadth of topics is significant, and there are extensive links to outside sources whose authoritativeness varies. This one is a great starting point for studying the evolving response to terrorism.
Listen Current provides access to audio clips from National Public Radio and other public networks from around the world that cover both current events and historical topics. The clips are short and easy to use with students. But that’s not all that the site can do for you.
They offer a series of powerful lesson plans that are Common Core from the ground up – aligned to standards and ready to use.
Smithsonian Tween Tribune has a collection of articles perfect for elementary and middle school students. You can easily access sports stories, national news, and more on their site. With a free login teachers can find Lexile levels for each articles in addition to lesson plans and quiz questions for students.
DOGO News Search by category and grade level (3-8). Guiding questions. The teacher account lets you create classes, reading lists. lesson plans, and moderated social interaction.
Political Games games include refugees, peace making, child soldiers, middle east and more.
The Wilson Center‘s app. It contains articles on a wide range of global issues including education, human rights, and technology. If your high school students are doing research on a current events topic or you’re just looking to dig into a news story, you’ll find lots of great articles.
The New York Times provides K-12 classrooms (in the U.S.) with free subscriptions to the Replica Edition NY Times. The Replica Edition is different from NYTimes.com as it does not offer all of additional features of NYTimes.com. The Replica Edition contains all of the articles found in the daily editions of The New York Times. With the free subscription to The New York Times Replica Edition you can read and search the last 30 days of newspapers, listen to the articles, and print the articles. Click here to learn more and to apply for the free subscription.
ProConIt
25 Maps and Charts That Explain American Today
“At the start of every year, government agencies, think tanks and businesses release sets of data and reports charting the nation’s social, economic and demographic course. Individually, each release of data offers a narrow snapshot of a narrow issue — voter attitudes, migration, unemployment, an assessment of policies, etc. — but collectively they tell a broader story.”
40 Charts That Explain the World
“One of the great things about charts is that they show not just how things are — but how they’re changing. So we searched for charts that would tell not just the story of how the world is — but where it’s going. Some of these charts are optimistic, like the ones showing huge gains in life expectancy in poorer nations. Some are more worryisome — wait till you see the one on endangered species. But together they tell a story of a world that’s changing faster than at arguably any other time in human history.”
Global Oneness Project offers free multicultural stories and accompanying lesson plans for high school and college classrooms. Their award-winning collection of films, photo essays, and articles explore cultural, social, and environmental issues from around the world with a humanistic lens. Aligned to National and Common Core Standards, their curriculum content contains an interdisciplinary approach to learning and facilitates the development of active, critical thinking.
WFP FoodForce gr 6 -12
This learning-oriented site is sponsored by the UN's World Food Programme and seeks to teach students about world hunger: its causes, its impact, and world-wide efforts to help. While the focus of the site is on a downloadable video game, there are a number of other great resources for teachers to use in teaching about world hunger. There is a Flash animated program called Counting the Hungry that gives a good, although pretty grim, overview. There are lesson plans and photo galleries and links to outside resources.
Thematic Mapping Engine provides users with a very simple way to create Google Earth kmz files. Thematic Mapping draws on data provided by the United Nations to create maps depicting all types of development data and environmental science data. Users select a statistical indicator category, select a year or range of years, and the manner in which they would like the data displayed in Google Earth. If you're using a Windows computer you can preview your files before downloading them.
Spent is an online game designed to teach players about the challenges of living on minimum wage (or slightly higher) employment. Players begin by selecting a job which will provide the wages they have to survive on for a month. Then throughout the game players are confronted with challenges that they have to handle by making an "either or" choice. After each choice the player's account balance is adjusted. In addition to the change in the player's balance sheet, each choice is followed by an explanation of consequence of the choice made.
Facing the Future is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to create tools for educators that equip and motivate students to develop critical thinking skills, build global awareness and engage in positive solutions for a sustainable future. The organization provides teachers with the resources they need in order to ignite their students’ interest in complex global issues while helping them to achieve academically. On the organization’s website, you’ll find free downloadable, hands-on lessons about global issues across the curriculum.
The Living Wage Calculator The purpose of the Living Wage Calculator is to provide a snapshot of what it actually costs to survive in counties and cities in the United States. The Living Wage Calculator shows the differences between minimum wages and minimum living wages for each county and some cities in the U.S. The calculator accounts for eight different household scenarios from single adult to two adults and three children living in the same household.
You Think! gr. 6-8
Delve into global issues with this outstanding site that explores topics like education, conflict, nutrition, the environment, and more, within the context of what matters to kids. Students can read factual summaries of the problems then investigate the related photographs, videos, galleries, and games. Click on the "Issues" link to view all available topics. Includes downloadable materials for teachers.
University of Washington Center for American Politics and Public Policy, the site is a interactive visualization that allows you and your students to explore actual patterns of lawmaking in Congress. The graph provides a great way to get the big picture while providing opportunities to dig deeper. Compare the bills and resolutions introduced by Senators and Representatives and follow their progress from the beginning to the end of a two year Congress. Go back in time and compare / contrast different years, bi-partisan vs. partisan, parties, or House vs. Senate.
You can filter your views by session, topic, type of legislation, chamber, party, member, or even search for a specific bill. You can zoom in and out to focus on a specific committee. You can also click on individual bills in the graph to get basic data – the box then hyperlinks out to the Congress.gov site for specific info.
Oxfam's Cool Planet for Teachers gr 6-12
Oxfam's Teacher Resource site contains a wealth of information about global issues and human rights. There are lesson plans on fair trade, social justice, sustainability, and a new unit on global music. Given the nature of the issues explored, there is a special teacher's guide to teaching controversial issues. The link to "Mapping our World" takes you to a great interactive look at the world and the impact of maps on our view of the world.
TV News Search & Borrow. gr. 7-12
The searchable collection now contains 350,000 news programs collected over three years from national and metro U.S. networks. You can search by keyword, network, and specific TV show. You can also limit the time period searched by using the timeline slider.
The Eviction Lab It’s an interactive map that can give you a detailed report (even by Census Tract!) about history of evictions taking place in what looks like any community in the U.S.You can also read more about it in this New York Times article, In 83 Million Eviction Records, a Sweeping and Intimate New Look at Housing in America.It will be an indispensable tool for any class that is analyzing/comparing neighborhoods. A Lesson Highlighting Community Assets — Not Deficits.
Reuters Video Index. To give my students a little more global perspective on the news than CNN Student News provides,
Online News Hour: Extra for Students gr 8-12
From the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Extra for Students is the place to visit for outstanding news features that take a deeper look at current events. To learn how other kids are reacting to the news, visit the Newz Crewz section where your comments are welcomed and posted. Teachers have a section all their own with lesson plans organized by curriculum.
The Mideast Struggle for Peace Grades 6 to 12
To radical Muslims, the U.S. relationship with Israel is a major factor in their view of the west. This gives the issue of peace in the Mideast a new perspective and urgency. This is CNN's special report on the current state of relations between Israel and the Palestinians, along with a history of the conflict in the region.
FORA.tv gr 7-12
Presents broadcasts and video clips of speakers addressing political, social and culatural issues throught the world. Transcripts of many of the video clips are available.
Game: Ayiti: The Cost of Life gr 7-12
Players manage life for a virtual family of five in rural Haiti. The object of the game is to make spending decisions--saving money vs. throwing a party vs. buying food--that keep the family healthy.
ICue - gr 7-12
NBC News has launched a free, collaborative learning community for students ages 13 and up that incorporates gaming, discussion, and video resources.
C-SPAN for the Classroom gr 6-12
C-SPAN Classroom has enhancements to its web site for middle and high school social-studies teachers. The upgrades are designed to make it easier and faster for educators to incorporate C-SPAN’s public affairs and political programming into their classrooms. Socialstudies teachers now can download free video clips; search archived and current video by keywords; and create
personalized user areas for favorite their clips. Video clips include a discussion about civil liberties
Newscribe gr 6-12
A service that recommends news stories to you based on stories you’ve previously saved. You can also write reviews about the stories, rate other users reviews, and discuss stories with reviewers.
NationMaster gr 6-12
Website for generating graphs and correlations is based on numerical data extracted from the CIA World Factbook, United Nations, World Health Organization, World Bank, World Resources Institute, UNESCO, UNICEF, OECD, and other sources of indicators that shape global commerce, health, politics and ecology. Student Section
StateMaster gr 6-12
StateMaster is a statistical database which allows you to research and compare a multitude of different data on US states. It includes pie charts, maps, graphs, scatterplots and there are thousands of map and flag images, state profiles, and correlations. http://www.statemaster.com/
Channel One gr. 6-12
Using video, news articles, quizzes, polls and games, the Channel One website has appeal to some teens.
The Largest Risks Faced by the World
The Largest Risks Faced by the World
Current Events Assignment Template Level1 | Level 2
middle school lesson plan aligned to NGSS standards. Students explore the characteristics of science and pseudoscience.
History Discussion Prompts for All 50 States a collection of video clips and "bell ringers" for every state in the United States. Bell Ringers are short video clips that are accompanied by discussion questions to start a lesson. the clips and bell ringers cover a wide array of topics related to each state. For example, the collection of Maine resources includes a video of top policy issues according to former governor Paul LePage, the Missouri Compromise, and the removal of a dam on the Kennebec River. The collection of resources about Iowa includes a bell ringer about the history of the Iowa caucuses, a bell ringer about African American migration to Iowa, and a lesson plan about the Louisiana Purchase. www.freetech4teachers.comGerrymandering 101 Limit voting rights in 3 easy steps. (And how to teach your students about it.)
Teaching Tools to Support a Global ClassroomWorld Savvy works with educators to make classrooms more inclusive, relevant, and engaging. The organization’s standards-aligned educational resources, curriculum, and teaching tools support the integration of global competence into teaching and learning. All content is free and accessible to anyone interested in globalizing their classroom or learning environment. A library of resources includes case studies (student-inquiry approach), knowledge-to-action (design thinking), multilingual learner toolkit, and student projects.
The Global News Project This is a multimedia platforms that employs the power of digital storytelling to explore and investigate key concepts and issues related to various aspects of our world. The Global News Project features films, documentaries, photo essays, and essays that shed light on issues related to environment, culture, and social diversity.
What’s the best country to live in? TED-Ed has a new interesting video and lesson – here’s how they describe it: Discover the shortcomings of using GDP to measure a country’s well-being, and what alternatives can be used to gauge quality of life.
A Good Source of U.S. History Lesson Starters Starting classroom conversations about a new topic or unit is a way to give students an interesting image or a short primary source document to review and ask questions about. A great place to find those conversation starters is the National Archive's Today's Document website. Every day Today's Document features a new image or document from the archives. The documents and images are from that day in history. Each one is accompanied by some additional research links and lesson plan resources. This short video I provides an overview of Today's Document and the related resources that it provides for U.S. History teachers. www.freetech4teachers.comThe Week in Pictures displays a small collection of photographs from around the world. The pictures capture a mix of serious news stories and lighter cultural stories. The Week in Pictures collections are part of a much larger resource from the BBC simply called In Pictures. The In Pictures resource provides hundreds of images in a variety collections and slideshows about current events throughout the world. Some of the slide shows even include narration. All of the images include captions explaining what is happening in the picture and a little background knowledge about the event being photographed. The following video I demonstrate how students can refine search results according to publication date. www.freetech4teachers.com
Dollar Street, a project created by Gapminder, sent teams of photographers around the world to take photos of over 264 homes in 50 different countries and uploaded them onto the website, allowing us to see how different people live across the world at different income points. The project imagines the world as a street ordered by income…poor families live at one end and rich families live at the other. A team of photographers went out and photographed the everyday items owned by families of all income levels — shoes, toothbrushes, TVs, beds, lights, sinks — so that visitors to the site can see how much income affects how families live.
Metroverse is an urban economy navigator built at the Growth Lab at Harvard University. It is based on over a decade of research on how economies grow and diversify and offers a detailed look into the specialization patterns of cities. As a dynamic resource, the tool is continually evolving with new data and features to help answer questions such as What is the economic composition of my city?How does my city compare to cities around the globe? Which cities look most like mine? What are the technological capabilities that underpin my city’s current economy? Which growth and diversification paths does that suggest for the future?
Disrupt Texts is a crowdsourced, grass roots effort by teachers for teachers to challenge the traditional canon in order to create a more inclusive, representative, and equitable language arts curriculum that our students deserve.
Population.IO - This interactive site lets you put in your age and country to explore how you fit into the world's population, and compare between different countries and times in history.
Naraview is a site on which you can create challenges for you students to connect topics through Wikipedia. The idea is that you give your students two topics and they have to click through Wikipedia articles to make the connections between the two topics. As the teacher, I can see the paths that students take to get from the starting article to the ending article. Here's an example of how Naraview works. www.freetech4teachers.com
World101 I Modules on the Issues, Forces, and Actors That Shape Our World The renewed focus on civics education in this country provides a promising path for readying students for the challenges of twenty-first century citizenship. The Council on Foreign Relations has created a free curriculum to facilitate this critical work. Educators are invited to explore the library of curriculum units —Global Era Issues; Regions of the World; and How the World Works—and Sometimes Doesn’t.
21 Sites For Short & Accessible Video “Explainers” About Current Events
New PBS NewsHour Video Segment: “Past pandemics have reshaped society. Will coronavirus do the same?”
The Learning Network gr. 3-12
Investigate the daily news . The site from the New York Times offers grade appropriate analysis of current events and articles, quizzes, and lesson plans. The Learning Network You’ll find writing prompts, contests and multimedia resources on this website.
U.S. News Map produced by Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia offers another interesting way to encourage students to explore digital archives. The U.S. News Map is based on the Chronicling America newspaper collection hosted by the Library of Congress. When you search on the U.S. News Map the results of your search will be displayed on an interactive map. Clicking on a placemarker the map will take you to a list of articles from newspapers in the area around the placemarker. You can then select an article from the list and read it on the Chronicling America website www.freetech4teachers.com
Why poor people make poor decisions is an insightful good article giving a review of that research, and it’s unfortunate that it has a terrible headline. No, not all poor people make poor decisions and, in fact, often make very rational decisions that are only perceived by some not in poverty as “poor” ones. But it is clear that economic pressures do have a negative impact on “cognitive bandwidth” that could ordinarily be devoted to to more reflection and planning.
The Best Visualizations Of Poverty In The U.S. & Around The World
The Best Resources About Wealth & Income Inequality
Global wealth, despite accounting for just 11.8 percent of the adult population. The base of the pyramid is the most poignant, and it shows how 2.8 billion people (53.2 percent of the world's population) share a combined wealth of $5 trillion - which is just 1.1 percent of total global wealth.
The Best Resources On Why Improving Education Is Not THE Answer To Poverty & Inequality
The Best Articles Showing Why Education Reform Is NOT The Best Way To Fight Poverty
StoryMapJS is a web-based digital tool for designing stories that make significant use of maps. It was designed for journalists but can be adapted for classroom use. In terms of project possibilities, students could create journeys, travel guides, historical fiction, nonfiction, news stories -- pretty much anything that relies on or benefits from maps. Creating a story is kind of like a hybrid of a slideshow and an interactive map. Students string together a series of slides where they can add text and then link map locations, images, and video to support the story.
Do Politics Make Us Irrational? explains the results of 2013 study about how politics can affect other parts of our decision making processes. Watch all the way through the lesson and you'll learn that it might not be just politics but any other deeply held allegiance that can cause us to make decisions that might be a little bit irrational. The lesson is made relatable to students through the us of an analogy between politics and sports. Watch the lesson as embedded below and find some good discussion questions here. www.freetech4teachers.com
Graphs to Help Students Think About Growing Inequalities in AmericaTo help students think critically about American society, The New York Times has compiled 28 graphs covering topics such as healthcare, education, and income. Among the graphs are examples that show how the coronavirus pandemic complicated the inequalities deeply entrenched in our society, as well as laid bare and widened these disparities. The Times has created a lesson plan to support teachers in guiding individual students or whole classes
Bad News is a website that offers simulations that show visitors how misinformation is spread through social media. Bad News is available in two versions. The regular version is intended for those who are high school age or older. Bad News Junior is appropriate for middle school and older elementary school students. www.freetech4teachers.com
Can You Spot the Problem With These Headlines? is a TED-Ed lesson that walks students through the dissection of a couple of hypothetical news headlines. By watching the video students can begin to understand how headlines are written to entice readers and how misleading headlines are created.
The Science Behind It, a project of the National Science Foundation, features questions on the issues people are curious about. It tells the story of why each topic is important and what current science tells us about it. Designed with everyday people in mind, the project highlights the ways science, engineering, and medicine touch our lives every day. For example, in response to the question, “Why do we need to encourage women in STEM?” students can read an article about the importance of women in science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine to our nation’s future and gain an understanding of the barriers women face in these fields. Visitors to the site can explore questions by topic (Space, Technology, Culture of Science, Cyber, Criminal Justice, Immigration, Security, Health, Climate Change, Biotech, Education, Energy), or they can take a quiz on a specific topic and check out the answers.
Math in the Media program from the American Mathematical Society (AMS), teachers can stay up-to-date with math in current events and get ideas for classroom activities. The site has two components: Digests of Math in the Media and Tony Phillips’ Take on Math in the Media. Every month AMS publishes a set of digests of recent news stories involving math. Each digest consists of a summary of the news story accompanied by classroom activities that will help students practice the math concepts discussed in the news. Tony Phillips’ monthly columns take a deeper dive into recent developments in the world of mathematics as reflected in the press and in nonmathematical journals.
Other Protests Flare and Fade. Why This Movement Already Seems Different
The Best Sites For Learning About Protests In History:
What Protests Can Do is from Five Thirty Eight.
Protests are a U.S. tradition, leading the way for social change since the country's founding CBS video
Three Ways to Explore the News Through Maps
- Newspaper Map is a neat tool for locating and reading newspapers from locations all around the world. Newspaper Map claims to have geolocated 10,000 newspapers. To find a newspaper you can browse the map then click on a placemark to open the link within to read a newspaper. You can also locate newspapers by using the search boxes to locate a newspaper by title or location. Along with links to the newspapers, Newspapers Map provides links to translate the newspapers you find on the map.
- Unfiltered News is a new site that uses an interactive cartogram to help you find trending news stories from around the world. To find stories through Unfiltered News simply open the website and click on a topic listed within one of the circles on the map. Once you've made a selection a list of stories will appear on the right side of your screen. Click on a story to read it in full. From the menu on the right side of the screen you can choose a different location and a new list of stories will appear.
- The U.S. News Map is a great resource produced by Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia. The U.S. New Map is an archive of American newspapers printed between 1836 and 1925. You can search the archive by entering a keyword or phrase. The results of your search will be displayed on an interactive map. Click on any of the markers on the map and you'll be shown a list of newspaper articles related to your search term. Click on a listed article to read it on the Library of Congress' Chronicling America website.
Write for Rights introduces students to human rights by writing letters to help 10 real young people around the world who are at risk just for their peaceful human rights activism. By participating in Write for Rights, students develop effective writing skills and experience firsthand the power of their words to make a difference. Students’ letters are actually delivered to the people who have the power to positively influence each case.
“After Parkland” is a new documentary about that terrible school shooting. Here’s a clip about it from ABC News, and you can read more about it here. You might also be interested in Not Very “Best” Lists Of The Week: Gun Violence.
Video: “Who pays the lowest taxes in the US?”
The NO Project is an award-winning, global, educational anti-slavery campaign that specifically targets youth awareness of modern slavery and human trafficking through film, music, art, dance, theatre, journalism, creative writing, education and social media. video tutorial
The Best Resources For Learning About Human Trafficking Today.
The Human Slavery Map is from Google Maps Mania.
Can reparations help right the wrongs of slavery?
Resources on the History of Policing and Today's Calls for Reform
Get vetted resources to help students learn more about policing in the United States, its historical roots in slavery and the Industrial Revolution, and the connections between today’s protests and longstanding efforts to reform law enforcement.
Teaching While White about the anxiety white teachers often feel while trying to teach about those difficult topics, especially to students of color.
Youngzine With new articles each week, Youngzine is a resource for texts to share with students. On this current events website you can find articles under science, technology and history categories. There are often maps, related resources and videos to explore with each article
CNN 10 CNN’s website provides quick ten-minute video clips for students featuring a wide variety of news stories. These commercial-free videos are perfect for sharing with students for daily updates. You might also decide to use these videos in a flipped classroom model for students to watch outside of the classroom and come back to class ready to discuss.
NBC Learn search for relevant content by standards. “The videos and primary resources are all from NBC News programs, and many of them provide additional teaching resources.
DOGOnews a next-generation online network empowering kids to engage with digital media in a fun, safe and social environment. News section has current events and news from all around the world. Written for and in some cases by children. The Maps section is an interactive way for younger readers to read news headlines geotagged on a world map. Learn about the world and see where it’s happening. Alao, teachers can set up their own DOGONews page and create a very personalized learning experience for their kids.
PBS NewsHour Extra is a good site for middle school and high school students. The site offers a searchable database of articles. A searchable database of lesson plans is also available on PBS NewsHour Extra. www.freetech4teachers.com
Teaching with Tolerance Educate children and youth to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to educators—teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioner,. to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants. The program emphasizes social justice and anti-bias.
Model Diplomacy Students become foreign policy experts in this real-world simulationThis impressive program has ready-to-use and expert-vetted content that'll help advanced students engage meaningfully with foreign policy issues and processes.
Teaching for Change "Teaching for Change provides teachers and parents with the tools to create schools where students learn to read, write, and change the world. By drawing direct connections to real world issues, Teaching for Change encourages teachers and students to question and re-think the world inside and outside their classrooms, build a more equitable, multicultural society, and become active global citizens."
Civic Online Reasoning, Here’s how they describe themselves.: Students are confused about how to evaluate online information. We all are. The new Civic Online Reasoning (COR) curriculum, developed by the Stanford History Education Group, provides free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world
The Week’s Classroom Education Program. This independent news source covers current events, arts, science, government, business and more. With a wide range of topics, it provides coverage in areas you may highlight alongside social studies or English Language Arts strategies.
World101, a program of the Council on Foreign Relations, offers a growing library of free multimedia resources that explain international affairs and foreign policy issues, helping students understand the basics of these topics, including why they matter and how they are relevant. Under Global Era Issues, educators will find ten modules that explore Globalism, Terrorism, Nuclear Proliferation, Climate Change, Migration, Cyberspace and Cybersecurity, Global Health, Trade, Monetary Policy and Currencies, and Development. Regions of the World presents six modules covering the Americas, Europe, Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, South and Central Asia, and East Asia and the Pacific. From essays and discussion questions to glossaries and up-to-date reading lists, World101 provides comprehensive teaching resources for each module.
Freckle It’s an “adaptive” platform where teachers can set up free virtual classrooms (it looks like it’s free to individual teachers, but schools and districts can pay for more features) and is supposed to differentiate in English, Math and Social Studies content. "Freckle empowers teachers to differentiate instruction across Math, ELA, Social Studies and Science."
Promoting civic engagement through children's literature
Becoming US
The Smithsonian Releases Curriculum On U.S. Migration & Immigration History Units of case studies are Borderlands: Mexican American War, Indian Boarding Schools, and Mexico; Education" Desegregation, Busing and Re-Segregation; Policy: Chinese Exclusion Act, DACA and Hart-Cellar Act; Belonging: Mexican Repatriation, Japanese Incarceration, and Islamophobia; Resistance: Stono Rebellion, Native Resistance, and Imokalee
NY Times Seven Unit writing Program a seven-unit writing curriculum. They describe it as “A flexible program for middle and high schools based on the real-world writing found in newspapers, from editorials and reviews to personal narratives and analysis essays.”
Immigration Issues
- The Best Practical Resources For Helping Teachers, Students & Families Respond To Immigration Challenges
- Becoming US high school resources, case studies, primary sources, and units all centered around the idea of immigration and migration history
- What Immigration Stories Teach Us To help students understand the complexities and nuances of immigration, teachers need to recognize that immigrant stories are rich and powerful. Immigrant stories need to be analyzed and studied, not just read. Find resources for this purpose.
- Immigration Today How can closely examining a troubling moment in history inform choices today? Facing History and Ourselves offers a free lesson that draws on readings and short videos featuring the United States Ambassador to the United Nations in conversation with the young people of Newcomers High School in New York—all immigrants—to explain and humanize a crisis that often feels too overwhelming to confront. After surveying the scope and impact of the global refugee crisis, students will come to understand what makes someone a “refugee.” They will then learn how even small ways of seeing the “other” in themselves can make a difference in their approach to large and complicated problems involving the needs and wellbeing of people distant from them. The lesson also considers the value of looking critically at historical moments—in particular, the case of the St. Louis, a ship that carried Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution across the Atlantic in 1939—and recognizing in them implications for their choices today. Click Here to Access Free Lesson
- The Demonization Of Immigrants As Invaders, And What Teachers & Students Can Do About It
- The Best Practical Resources For Helping Teachers, Students & Families Respond To Immigration Challenges
The Best Practical Resources For Helping Teachers, Students & Families Respond To Immigration Challenges)
Story-based Game on the Aftermath of a Hurricane Community in Crisis is a story-based literacy game in which students take on the role of director of a community center dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane. In that role, students will need to work with their staff to prioritize relief efforts to best serve individuals and the community as a whole. They must talk with staff and citizens, keep an eye on their to-do list for problems to solve, and decide which actions to initiate. An in-game cellphone features the to-do list, messages from characters, a glossary, and a notepad. The game includes 12 episodes, which take 20 to 30 minutes each. Students visit various locations, click on hot spots, and engage in dialogue with characters or complete tasks.
Syrian Journey: Choose Your Own Escape Route helps students to understand the real dilemmas that Syrian refugees face. This journey is based on extensive research and real stories of Syrians who have made the trek. Syrian Journey is a playable blog post with threaded endings. When they play Syrian Journey, students take notes on the decisions and choices made, and describe the difficulties and challenges faced. As Syrian refugees, students decide whether to deal with smugglers or take a dangerous raft ride across the Mediterranean Sea. The culminating activity involves the creation of a student journal that includes where, as refugees, they are headed and whether asylum is granted. It includes all the push and pull factors of immigration.
Space for Respectful Discourse Around Civics-Related IssuesYouth Nation was created by Rutgers University’s Social–Emotional and Character Development (SECD) Lab for adolescents to exercise political expression and hear from other youth around the country. Free downloadable curricula orient teachers to Youth Nation and suggest ways to use the website in the classroom. An introductory lesson guides students in navigating the website.The website is intended to show students how they can push their limits and understand themselves through thoughtful stories. It is also intended for students to find stories that inspire them. They can learn what other young people care about and weigh in on issues occurring around them. Adolescents can interact on the site by commenting on articles or submitting ideas for posts as an activity for current events, for clubs in school, or as part of out-of-school programs. Members of the SECD Lab approve all content. Youth can also browse the activities of the month, which include games and art projects to do at home or in the classroom. Recent posts include “Talking to your ‘angry relative’ over the holidays: A guide”; “McCarthyism: blocking democratic freedoms in the 1950s”; “Why does voting matter? A quick explanation”; and “Science literacy informs the democratic process.” New posts are added monthly; old posts are archived, yet still accessible.
Which Voting System is Best? TEDed video
Gerrymandering: How drawing jagged lines can impact an election The US is the only democracy thta does not have an independent committee to draw congressional districts.
Gerrymandering Explained Video
Does your vote count? The Electoral College explained video
Surging Seas interactive.Type in the name of any coastal location in the United States, and you’ll see what the future holds.
“WHICH COUNTRIES WILL HOLD THE POWER IN 20 YEARS’ TIME?”
The United States Census Bureau has released “Statistics in Schools,” a free K–12 curriculum that features 20 lessons to help students understand why being counted in 2020 is important. The curriculum includes “Appointment,” a 35-minute study for grades 7 and 8 on how to use, analyze, and interpret data; and “Make Data Speak,” a 40-minute unit for grades 9–12 on how to collect and interpret data, and display the information in a visually creative way. Nearly every lesson concludes with objectives that help students connect the census count to distribution of resources within communities.
The Week’s Classroom Education Program. High School This independent news source covers current events, arts, science, government, business and more. With a wide range of topics, it provides coverage in areas you may highlight alongside social studies or English Language Arts strategies.
Xyza is a news experience made just for elementary and middle school–aged children. Whether reading, watching, responding, or contributing, students get the opportunity to learn about the events that are occurring in the world right now. Xyza’s news stories cover politics, world events, entertainment, sports, arts, culture, science, technology, and more.
Here There Everywhere a news website/blog designed for elementary and older school-aged children. Its purpose is to show kids how they are connected to their world and introduce them to the people and events shaping it. It credits children with being interested in and being able to understand some of the more newsy topics (though there will be lots of the fun stuff, too!).
How economic inequality might affect a society's well-being
Google News can search for news using categories such as Wold, Business, Sport, Science, Health…etc. They can also search for news on geographical area or in nearby places.
The World Day Against Child Labor – Here Are Related Teaching & Learning Resources
Issues Viewed Through the Lens of the US Presidency
The Miller Center at University of Virginia offers a free teacher- and student-friendly collection of resources that are about all of the US presidents and key public issues of each period. Each president’s page includes carefully crafted essays by experts, quick facts, presidential speeches, interviews with scholars, relevant publications, and more. Students can read detailed content about the presidents’ lives before they came into office, their campaigns, the domestic and foreign issues they faced during their administrations, and their lasting legacy on American history. For example, a 12-minute video about a current controversial issue, “Race And The Crisis of Justice,” looks at the history of race, policing, and incarceration in the United States through the lens of the presidency.
Teaching Civics website – a place with over 800 lesson plans. They also have some handy ed resources.
Current Special Projects: Understanding World Events - gr. 6-12
Maintained by Educators for Social Responsibility, a nonprofit organization founded in 1982, whose mission is "to make teaching social responsibility a core practice in education." This particular page focuses on helping young people cope with and understand global issues and crisis events. It consists of teaching resources, lessons, guides, sponsored events, and lists of best-of-Web links. Topics addressed include Current Events Lessons, Dealing with Crises, Understanding War, and Countering Discrimination.
"To Fix Fake News Look to Yellow Journalism"
Examples for Teaching with Fake News and Pseudoscience
7 websites to teach fake news
Listenwise ( gr. 6 - 12) makes it easy to bring authentic voices and compelling non-fiction stories to the classroom. Teach your students to Listen with the Power of Public Radio. Curates the best of public radio to keep teaching connected to the real world and build student listening skills at the same time.
Lynching In America. Google has supported the development of a brand-new site created by the Equal Justice Initiative. It includes multi-media resources and maps, along with discussions on how it relates to criminal justice today.
Digital Explorer engages young people in global issues for a better future. Our unique projects provide inspirational lessons and resources direct from the world to your classroom.
Science News for Students is an online publication dedicated to providing age-appropriate, topical science news to learners, parents, and educators. SNS, which is free to use, helps to fulfill the Society’s mission by connecting the latest in scientific research to learning in and out of the classroom. Science News for Students publishes award-winning journalism on research across the breadth of science, health, and technology fields, with the aim to bring these new developments to a younger audience.
Global Student Laboratory is a web-based, educational platform that enables students, teachers, and learners of all ages to pose questions and together find answers. With GlobalLab, teachers have, in one place, all the resources, tools, partners, and support to bring authentic investigations to classrooms and homes. Each project is a collaborative journey of challenges and discovery. In nine projects, step by step, students use math, graphing, and more to discover who they are as a community.
Newspaper Map for locating and reading newspapers from locations all around the world. Newspaper Map claims to have put placemarks for more 10,000 newspapers on one Google Map. To find a newspaper you can browse the map then click on a placemark to open the link within to read a newspaper. You can also locate newspapers by using the search boxes to locate a newspaper by title or location. Along with links to the newspapers, Newspapers Map provides links to translate the newspapers you find on the map.
The Best Online Tools To See Newspapers From Around The World
Penpal Schools gives students from different backgrounds and countries the opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue about hot-button issues, such as immigration and health care. In one instance, students from the “Rust Belt” had an open, respectful conversation with students from immigrant families. The program usually conducted over six weeks. Each student is matched with a penpal and given standards-aligned topics to write to their pal about. Teachers can choose from umbrella topics such as World Explorer and World News, and they can review and grade students’ work. Penpal Schools is offered at no charge to those who can’t pay.
The Why Files (gr. 5 - 8) is a resource designed for students to learn about the science of stories in the news. The Why Files doesn't cover every current events news story, just the stories that have connections to science concepts.
The Uprooted is a useful interactive map demonstrating the extent of today’s world refugee crisis.
SciShow and SciShowKids. These channels are produced by the same folks who make Crash Course. Each video deals with a scientific topic in an interesting and engaging way. Some topics, like the science of beer and wine, are not suitable for kids.
Suppression Trail, The New York Times has created a great learning “game” to help people understand the difficulties many face when they want to vote in the United States. Check out “The Voter Suppression Trail,” done in the style of the classic Oregon Trail game.
Euronews News articles from around the world. Can search by different languages.
ListenCurrent makes it easy to bring authentic voices and compelling non-fiction Public Radio stories to the classroom. Vetted for the best of public radio to keep teaching connected to the real world and build student listening skills at the same time. Includes questions and discussion themes in the free version.
Mapstory News from around the world with pin options. You can also use mapstories created by others.
ProCon non-profit organization promotes critical thinking, education, and informed citizenship by presenting controversial issues in a straightforward, nonpartisan, and primarily pro/con format. The subject groups include politics, science and technology, elections and presidents, world/international issues, health and medicine, entertainment and sports, and much more. The Teachers’ Corner provides free lesson plans, a section on how teachers can meet Common Core and NCSS standards as they use ProCon materials, and a section on teaching controversial issues and critical thinking. The topics range from “Minimum Wage” to “Illegal Immigration”; from “Tablets vs Textbooks” to “Video Games and Violence.”
Terrorism - Questions and Answers Grades 6 to 12
This regularly-updated site strives to provide straightforward information in a "what we do know; what we don't know..." format. The breadth of topics is significant, and there are extensive links to outside sources whose authoritativeness varies. This one is a great starting point for studying the evolving response to terrorism.
Listen Current provides access to audio clips from National Public Radio and other public networks from around the world that cover both current events and historical topics. The clips are short and easy to use with students. But that’s not all that the site can do for you.
They offer a series of powerful lesson plans that are Common Core from the ground up – aligned to standards and ready to use.
Smithsonian Tween Tribune has a collection of articles perfect for elementary and middle school students. You can easily access sports stories, national news, and more on their site. With a free login teachers can find Lexile levels for each articles in addition to lesson plans and quiz questions for students.
DOGO News Search by category and grade level (3-8). Guiding questions. The teacher account lets you create classes, reading lists. lesson plans, and moderated social interaction.
Political Games games include refugees, peace making, child soldiers, middle east and more.
- Half the Sky
- The Migrant Trail
- Global Conflicts Series
- On the Ground Reporter (Uganda, Afghanistan)
- Papers, Please
- Prison Valley
- Argubot Academy
- Darfur is Dying
- My Life as a Refugee
- The Civic Mirror
- Airport Security
- America 2049
- People Power
- Crisis of Nations
- Gray
- Urbanology
- Prisoners of War
The Wilson Center‘s app. It contains articles on a wide range of global issues including education, human rights, and technology. If your high school students are doing research on a current events topic or you’re just looking to dig into a news story, you’ll find lots of great articles.
The New York Times provides K-12 classrooms (in the U.S.) with free subscriptions to the Replica Edition NY Times. The Replica Edition is different from NYTimes.com as it does not offer all of additional features of NYTimes.com. The Replica Edition contains all of the articles found in the daily editions of The New York Times. With the free subscription to The New York Times Replica Edition you can read and search the last 30 days of newspapers, listen to the articles, and print the articles. Click here to learn more and to apply for the free subscription.
ProConIt
- Allow for students to look at the opposite views of a subject
- Created polls and forum
- Encourage discussion
- Get feedback
25 Maps and Charts That Explain American Today
“At the start of every year, government agencies, think tanks and businesses release sets of data and reports charting the nation’s social, economic and demographic course. Individually, each release of data offers a narrow snapshot of a narrow issue — voter attitudes, migration, unemployment, an assessment of policies, etc. — but collectively they tell a broader story.”
40 Charts That Explain the World
“One of the great things about charts is that they show not just how things are — but how they’re changing. So we searched for charts that would tell not just the story of how the world is — but where it’s going. Some of these charts are optimistic, like the ones showing huge gains in life expectancy in poorer nations. Some are more worryisome — wait till you see the one on endangered species. But together they tell a story of a world that’s changing faster than at arguably any other time in human history.”
Global Oneness Project offers free multicultural stories and accompanying lesson plans for high school and college classrooms. Their award-winning collection of films, photo essays, and articles explore cultural, social, and environmental issues from around the world with a humanistic lens. Aligned to National and Common Core Standards, their curriculum content contains an interdisciplinary approach to learning and facilitates the development of active, critical thinking.
WFP FoodForce gr 6 -12
This learning-oriented site is sponsored by the UN's World Food Programme and seeks to teach students about world hunger: its causes, its impact, and world-wide efforts to help. While the focus of the site is on a downloadable video game, there are a number of other great resources for teachers to use in teaching about world hunger. There is a Flash animated program called Counting the Hungry that gives a good, although pretty grim, overview. There are lesson plans and photo galleries and links to outside resources.
Thematic Mapping Engine provides users with a very simple way to create Google Earth kmz files. Thematic Mapping draws on data provided by the United Nations to create maps depicting all types of development data and environmental science data. Users select a statistical indicator category, select a year or range of years, and the manner in which they would like the data displayed in Google Earth. If you're using a Windows computer you can preview your files before downloading them.
Spent is an online game designed to teach players about the challenges of living on minimum wage (or slightly higher) employment. Players begin by selecting a job which will provide the wages they have to survive on for a month. Then throughout the game players are confronted with challenges that they have to handle by making an "either or" choice. After each choice the player's account balance is adjusted. In addition to the change in the player's balance sheet, each choice is followed by an explanation of consequence of the choice made.
Facing the Future is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to create tools for educators that equip and motivate students to develop critical thinking skills, build global awareness and engage in positive solutions for a sustainable future. The organization provides teachers with the resources they need in order to ignite their students’ interest in complex global issues while helping them to achieve academically. On the organization’s website, you’ll find free downloadable, hands-on lessons about global issues across the curriculum.
The Living Wage Calculator The purpose of the Living Wage Calculator is to provide a snapshot of what it actually costs to survive in counties and cities in the United States. The Living Wage Calculator shows the differences between minimum wages and minimum living wages for each county and some cities in the U.S. The calculator accounts for eight different household scenarios from single adult to two adults and three children living in the same household.
You Think! gr. 6-8
Delve into global issues with this outstanding site that explores topics like education, conflict, nutrition, the environment, and more, within the context of what matters to kids. Students can read factual summaries of the problems then investigate the related photographs, videos, galleries, and games. Click on the "Issues" link to view all available topics. Includes downloadable materials for teachers.
University of Washington Center for American Politics and Public Policy, the site is a interactive visualization that allows you and your students to explore actual patterns of lawmaking in Congress. The graph provides a great way to get the big picture while providing opportunities to dig deeper. Compare the bills and resolutions introduced by Senators and Representatives and follow their progress from the beginning to the end of a two year Congress. Go back in time and compare / contrast different years, bi-partisan vs. partisan, parties, or House vs. Senate.
You can filter your views by session, topic, type of legislation, chamber, party, member, or even search for a specific bill. You can zoom in and out to focus on a specific committee. You can also click on individual bills in the graph to get basic data – the box then hyperlinks out to the Congress.gov site for specific info.
Oxfam's Cool Planet for Teachers gr 6-12
Oxfam's Teacher Resource site contains a wealth of information about global issues and human rights. There are lesson plans on fair trade, social justice, sustainability, and a new unit on global music. Given the nature of the issues explored, there is a special teacher's guide to teaching controversial issues. The link to "Mapping our World" takes you to a great interactive look at the world and the impact of maps on our view of the world.
TV News Search & Borrow. gr. 7-12
The searchable collection now contains 350,000 news programs collected over three years from national and metro U.S. networks. You can search by keyword, network, and specific TV show. You can also limit the time period searched by using the timeline slider.
The Eviction Lab It’s an interactive map that can give you a detailed report (even by Census Tract!) about history of evictions taking place in what looks like any community in the U.S.You can also read more about it in this New York Times article, In 83 Million Eviction Records, a Sweeping and Intimate New Look at Housing in America.It will be an indispensable tool for any class that is analyzing/comparing neighborhoods. A Lesson Highlighting Community Assets — Not Deficits.
Reuters Video Index. To give my students a little more global perspective on the news than CNN Student News provides,
Online News Hour: Extra for Students gr 8-12
From the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Extra for Students is the place to visit for outstanding news features that take a deeper look at current events. To learn how other kids are reacting to the news, visit the Newz Crewz section where your comments are welcomed and posted. Teachers have a section all their own with lesson plans organized by curriculum.
The Mideast Struggle for Peace Grades 6 to 12
To radical Muslims, the U.S. relationship with Israel is a major factor in their view of the west. This gives the issue of peace in the Mideast a new perspective and urgency. This is CNN's special report on the current state of relations between Israel and the Palestinians, along with a history of the conflict in the region.
FORA.tv gr 7-12
Presents broadcasts and video clips of speakers addressing political, social and culatural issues throught the world. Transcripts of many of the video clips are available.
Game: Ayiti: The Cost of Life gr 7-12
Players manage life for a virtual family of five in rural Haiti. The object of the game is to make spending decisions--saving money vs. throwing a party vs. buying food--that keep the family healthy.
ICue - gr 7-12
NBC News has launched a free, collaborative learning community for students ages 13 and up that incorporates gaming, discussion, and video resources.
C-SPAN for the Classroom gr 6-12
C-SPAN Classroom has enhancements to its web site for middle and high school social-studies teachers. The upgrades are designed to make it easier and faster for educators to incorporate C-SPAN’s public affairs and political programming into their classrooms. Socialstudies teachers now can download free video clips; search archived and current video by keywords; and create
personalized user areas for favorite their clips. Video clips include a discussion about civil liberties
Newscribe gr 6-12
A service that recommends news stories to you based on stories you’ve previously saved. You can also write reviews about the stories, rate other users reviews, and discuss stories with reviewers.
NationMaster gr 6-12
Website for generating graphs and correlations is based on numerical data extracted from the CIA World Factbook, United Nations, World Health Organization, World Bank, World Resources Institute, UNESCO, UNICEF, OECD, and other sources of indicators that shape global commerce, health, politics and ecology. Student Section
StateMaster gr 6-12
StateMaster is a statistical database which allows you to research and compare a multitude of different data on US states. It includes pie charts, maps, graphs, scatterplots and there are thousands of map and flag images, state profiles, and correlations. http://www.statemaster.com/
Channel One gr. 6-12
Using video, news articles, quizzes, polls and games, the Channel One website has appeal to some teens.
The Largest Risks Faced by the World
Apps
Some of the links only take you to the IOS version. There often is an android version also.
Snackr
allows you to listen to a set of customized news channels. Snackr's goal is to provide you with headlines and summaries of news that is most important to you and your students. video demo
PeaceMaker game for iOS or Android. Students can go beyond just reading the news; they can “play” the news as they try to bring peace to the Middle East with the freeAs they play the game, students will experience the joy of bringing peace to the Middle East, or they will succumb to the agony of plunging the region into disaster. PeaceMakerwill test students’ skills as a leader, as well as their assumptions and prior knowledge about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The game—available in English, Arabic, and Hebrew—is inspired by real events in this conflict. Cost: $1.99
Baloney Meter Critical thinking is an important part of learning and involves the ability to reason effectively, utilize systems thinking, make judgements, and solve problems. Although it is an important component of learning, how do you help your students to think beyond the obvious? This free iOS App leads you through several questions to consider the relevance of a claim, website, and even political candidate!
News-O-Matic, Daily Reading for Kids
provides images, videos and maps to accompany five daily news stories. An interactive map with quirky facts, puzzles, games and the NewsRoom are all features that engage students in current events.
Watchup.
allows you to create your own news program by choosing short clips from different news sources (EuroNews, AP, PBS, etc.).
Talking Tom & Ben News Reporters-
students create dialogues that reflect any news item worldwide and around the school. Kids will love when Tom and Ben report that news.
News-O-Matic. is a daily newspaper for kids available on both iOS and Android devices (the app will soon be available on the Amazon Kindle Fire tablets). It provides engaging nonfiction text for young readers to help them learn about the world around them. With topics including election news, sports coverage and science discoveries, there is plenty of exciting content to capture the attention of your students. Their new update (coming soon!) will be specifically designed for use in schools. It will include custom reading levels for individual students, built-in assessments that are customizable, and analytics including quiz scores, reading levels and time spent reading. News-O-Matic will be able to support differentiated instruction while giving students access to high-interest, informational text.
Newsy This app is more than an aggregator of video news clips: Newsy actually has an editorial staff making decisions on content. Every story—in topics ranging from national news to sports—is introduced by a Newsy anchor and typically rounds up video clips from at least three sources
NBC Nightly News
features up to the minute video clips on events of the day.
allows you to listen to a set of customized news channels. Snackr's goal is to provide you with headlines and summaries of news that is most important to you and your students. video demo
PeaceMaker game for iOS or Android. Students can go beyond just reading the news; they can “play” the news as they try to bring peace to the Middle East with the freeAs they play the game, students will experience the joy of bringing peace to the Middle East, or they will succumb to the agony of plunging the region into disaster. PeaceMakerwill test students’ skills as a leader, as well as their assumptions and prior knowledge about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The game—available in English, Arabic, and Hebrew—is inspired by real events in this conflict. Cost: $1.99
Baloney Meter Critical thinking is an important part of learning and involves the ability to reason effectively, utilize systems thinking, make judgements, and solve problems. Although it is an important component of learning, how do you help your students to think beyond the obvious? This free iOS App leads you through several questions to consider the relevance of a claim, website, and even political candidate!
- Is the claim baloney?
- Is its source reliable?
- Can it be tested?
- Is there confirmation for it?
- Can there be another explanation?
News-O-Matic, Daily Reading for Kids
provides images, videos and maps to accompany five daily news stories. An interactive map with quirky facts, puzzles, games and the NewsRoom are all features that engage students in current events.
Watchup.
allows you to create your own news program by choosing short clips from different news sources (EuroNews, AP, PBS, etc.).
Talking Tom & Ben News Reporters-
students create dialogues that reflect any news item worldwide and around the school. Kids will love when Tom and Ben report that news.
News-O-Matic. is a daily newspaper for kids available on both iOS and Android devices (the app will soon be available on the Amazon Kindle Fire tablets). It provides engaging nonfiction text for young readers to help them learn about the world around them. With topics including election news, sports coverage and science discoveries, there is plenty of exciting content to capture the attention of your students. Their new update (coming soon!) will be specifically designed for use in schools. It will include custom reading levels for individual students, built-in assessments that are customizable, and analytics including quiz scores, reading levels and time spent reading. News-O-Matic will be able to support differentiated instruction while giving students access to high-interest, informational text.
Newsy This app is more than an aggregator of video news clips: Newsy actually has an editorial staff making decisions on content. Every story—in topics ranging from national news to sports—is introduced by a Newsy anchor and typically rounds up video clips from at least three sources
NBC Nightly News
features up to the minute video clips on events of the day.
Infographics
Infographic Site
Locate Infographics and create your own.
Infographic: “Visualizing Women’s Economic Rights Around the World”
Infographic: “How Much Do Countries Spend on Education?”
Infographic: the countries with the most refugees
Infographic “The World Population in 2100, by Country”
Infographic “Visualizing Global Per Capita CO2 Emissions”
Infographic “The World Population in 2100, by Country”
See The Causes of Death Visually in Every Country GBD Compare is an impressive visualization of the causes of death in every country around the world.
Slow Reveal Graphs Rather than presenting a full graph to students and asking them to interpret it, teachers use Slow Reveal Graphs to allow the students to discuss, think, wonder, and predict as each stage of the graph is shown – hopefully resulting in deeper learning. (This technique is similar to the one used in the New York Times’ “What’s Going on in this Graph?”
Locate Infographics and create your own.
Infographic: “Visualizing Women’s Economic Rights Around the World”
Infographic: “How Much Do Countries Spend on Education?”
Infographic: the countries with the most refugees
Infographic “The World Population in 2100, by Country”
Infographic “Visualizing Global Per Capita CO2 Emissions”
Infographic “The World Population in 2100, by Country”
See The Causes of Death Visually in Every Country GBD Compare is an impressive visualization of the causes of death in every country around the world.
Slow Reveal Graphs Rather than presenting a full graph to students and asking them to interpret it, teachers use Slow Reveal Graphs to allow the students to discuss, think, wonder, and predict as each stage of the graph is shown – hopefully resulting in deeper learning. (This technique is similar to the one used in the New York Times’ “What’s Going on in this Graph?”
Ethical Issues
Ethical Issue Videos by Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor who writes and talks about ethical dilemmas. Harvard recently posted a series of short animated videos he uses in his online courses, and they’re fabulous!
You can see and access the entire playlist here.
Tolerance: Digital Literacy…Understanding how the brain processes information can help students unravel the origins of fake news and other mysteries of the internet.)
Resources For Teaching & Learning About Race & Racism:
The World Day Against Child Labor – Here Are Related Teaching & Learning Resources
Resources Sharing The History Of Teens Organizing For Justice
Talking With Students About Human Rights Incorporate discussions about human rights issues into your lessons, whether they stem from events in the U.S. or abroad.
Resources Sharing The History Of Teens Organizing For Justice.
You can see and access the entire playlist here.
Tolerance: Digital Literacy…Understanding how the brain processes information can help students unravel the origins of fake news and other mysteries of the internet.)
Resources For Teaching & Learning About Race & Racism:
- A long history of rejecting ‘different’ Americans is a good article in the Washington Post given some historical perspective on the “othering” of certain Americans, as well as NPR’s ‘Go Back Where You Came From’: The Long Rhetorical Roots Of Trump’s Racist Tweets.
- New & Revised: A Collection Of Advice On Talking To Students About Race & RacA Beginning List Of The Best Resources For Fighting Islamophobia In Schools
- The Demonization Of Immigrants As Invaders, And What Teachers & Students Can Do About It
- The Best Practical Resources For Helping Teachers, Students & Families Respond To Immigration Challenges
The World Day Against Child Labor – Here Are Related Teaching & Learning Resources
Resources Sharing The History Of Teens Organizing For Justice
Talking With Students About Human Rights Incorporate discussions about human rights issues into your lessons, whether they stem from events in the U.S. or abroad.
Resources Sharing The History Of Teens Organizing For Justice.
Ethical Issues
Implicit Bias Video
- Privilege Walk strategy
- Going Beyond the Privilege Walk
- Racial Equity
- White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh
- White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack and Some Notes for Facilitators
- Race Conscious: Strategies
- 100 Race Conscious Things to Say To Your Child to Advance Racial Justice
- Color Blind or Color Conscious?
- Learning for Justice
Learning for Justice features curated resources to teach students about concepts related to social justice and equity. Resources offered touch on diverse topics including: race and ethnicity, religion, ability, rights and activism, bullying and bias, gender and sexual identity, immigration, and more.
Equity Literacy Institute
The Equity Literacy Institute offers free and downloadable resources designed by EdChange and the Equity Literacy Institute touching on topics related to multiculturalism, equity, and social justice.
So Just
So Just provides access to primary source documents on social justice. The site's collection features "historic speeches, songs, poetry, and manifestos on human rights and social justice. So*Just is a free resources from EdChange and the Equity Literacy Institute."
Macmillan Education Cultural Awareness Collection
Macmillan Education offers this selection of courses to use in class to teach students about cultural awareness.