CNN Student News is a great way to get students involved in current events. With all the information at our finger tips and the wealth of knowledge available, students should be guided where to find useful information on the internet. Today with the massive overflow of information students receive, it is often hard for them to know where to find reliable information. That is where CNN Student News comes into play. CNN Student News has setup a wonderful site for students to use as well as being full of resources so teachers can incorporate it into the classroom.

Classroom Uses

CNN Student News works well with students around grades 3-8. It breaks down current events, as well as explains important background knowledge in quick segments. For example, when reporting the arrest of a high ranking Taliban official, the news team

reviewed who the Taliban were and why it was a significant news event.

Not only does CNN Student News review past situations, but they also develop discussion and comprehension questions for further use within the classroom. This provides instant feedback for the teacher as to the students complete understanding of the news report. There are also interactive maps, assignments, and other resources for teachers to use within the website. Overall, it is definitely worth the visit to check it out!

DonorsChoose.org is one of those sites you can hear about soon enough. All teachers spend a plethora of cash out of their own pockets, and would spend more if they had the chance. All teachers have those projects they wish they could do, but can’t due to funding. Donors Choose is a site to help bring those projects and ideas to life. Donors Choose has partnered with companies such as Barnes & Noble and Sonic in order to help teachers fund classroom projects. Teachers are allowed to place projects on the site for people to donate, and all that is asked in return is a thank you note from both teacher and students, as well as photos of the project in action. To make this step even easier, Donors Choose sends the self address enveloped when the project materials are delivered, with a disposal camera to take the pictures! Once you have a project funded, and return the thank you packet, your allowed to submit another project!

Image via Wikipedia

Classroom Use

Donors Choose makes it painless to seek funds for classroom projects. From class book sets for novel studies, to digital cameras for video and podcasting, many different projects find funding. They have integration with both Facebook and Twitter for easy social sharing, as well as a teacher page hosted on Donors Choose (find mine here). Also, students get involved and take ownership when they write the thank you packets and work in the photos of the project taking place.

Ever found that interesting article you just wish you had the time to read? You bookmark it, intending to read it when you get home, or perhaps you email it to yourself. Then in the jammed pack email inbox, or loaded browser bookmarks, it sort of gets lost. In comes Read It Later. Read It Later is a sort of bookmarking service that allows you to save interesting articles so when you finally have the chance to take it in, it can be easily located.

Read It Later is not the only service of its kind. Instapaper is another similar service, however I found the services available, as well as the asthetics of Read It Later make it a much more user friendly service. Read It Later integrates with Facebook and Twitter, as well as email. It has both iPhone & iPad versions, which integrate with the same services as well. While Instapaper has similar integration tools, the one feature Read It Later has that sets it apart is called Digest (which is available for a one time $5 upgrade fee). Digest is a feature which groups your articles in categories, and then allows users to quickly browse through saved articles. Photos and videos are shown in thumbnail view, which makes it much easier to find that specific article. If you have many articles in a specific categories, you can jump to the category tab in order to view all articles for the given section.

Classroom Use

I find that I use Read It Later as a PLN (personal learning network) manager of sorts. I find that I subscribe to many RSS feeds, many teachers on Twitter who share wonderful sites, and recieve many websites from colleagues via email. This is where Read It Later comes in handy. Whenever I see something I want to look at deeper, I instantly save it to Read It Later. It is very useful in cases, such at school, where I don’t have the time to really sit down and read an article. Read It Later has abookmarklet for easy article saving, both a Chrome and Firefox plugin, and an easy send it to plugin for Google Reader.