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By Dr. Harry Tennant
Friday, December 10, 2010 Pass It On Education Tools: CNN Student News Before my days as an administrator, I was a Social Studies Composite teacher. Back in the day, as they say, CNN started a ten-minute student broadcast they called "CNN in the Classroom." This was the mid-90s. The program aired in the wee hours, only to be viewed by insomniacs or VCR editors...like myself! I taped episodes, edited particularly useful segments, and used them in lessons or as classroom conversation pieces. In hindsight, modern technologies make the effort I expended in this sort of lesson prep seem burdensome and inefficient in comparison with what teachers can do today. That is true of so many aspects of rich lesson prep. An example is CNN Student News. The program is still going strong as a daily ten-minute, commercial-free presentation of the news in a manner that is more approachable for school age people. It also presents stories that students find more relevant and goes beyond this to help students establish relevancy. The program now has a website, rich with supplementary materials, and the ten-minute program for each school day is posted (as a video "Daily Podcast" for download!) by around 7:00 pm the night prior.  Oh, how I would have loved this as a social studies teacher! This free daily broadcast from CNN, edited with simple software like iMovie (to really focus on the important pieces and add supporting content to guide the subsequent lesson) would have really simplified a portion of the lesson prep I undertook to make my class engaging for the students. Tools and resources are available like never before to produce lesson plans that involve students in lessons they find relevant and engaging. A big part of my mission with this blog is to locate those tools and resources so I can spotlight them here for you. In turn, I hope that you will share them with colleagues and friends to enrich their lessons and lives! Check It Out! Pass It On!
Posted at 10:29 AM Keywords: Pass It On , Pass It On Education Tools , CNN , CNN Student News 0 Comments |