2016 Election Candidates & Where They Stand

ProCon.org has great resources for students to examine controversial topics in a balanced way. They have taken this approach and have curated a variety of resources for students for the upcoming 2016 election. They plan to continue to update the site with resources and data through October 2016. ProCon.org is a great place to have students explore past elections, take a candidate quiz to see with whom their ideas match up, examine campaign finances and more.

On their home page, students can select an issue and get an overall quick view on who is pro or con, as well as read about what the candidate has stated on the issue in their own words and view the sourcing of the statements. This is a great model for sourcing information and evaluating information from multiple sources. They also have a chart comparing candidates on a variety of topics. A possible inquiry activity would be to have students examine an article or candidate statement about an opponent and complete their own fact checking to practice being an informed citizen in the digital information age.

Listen to Current Events with Listen Current

Sometimes getting students to read about current events takes some encouraging. Many would rather listen to their earphones. Alternatively, some may have reading difficulties or be auditory learners. Here is where Listen Current comes to the rescue.  Listen Current utilizes public radio broadcasts of current events and stories related to History, ELA, and Science to help build students' listening skills. This is right in line with the Common Core. They also provide discussion questions that can be utilized as extension activities. There are a variety of topics available at the middle school and high school level to engage your students with.

Another great feature of Listen Current are there pre-made Socrative quizzes. (Socrative is a free data gathering tool that you can sign up for) You can check for understanding with your students quickly by having students go on to their electronic device whether it is a computer, tablet, or cell phone and take the quiz.

Let's get our students working on their listening and discussion skills and fostering their civic skills.

The process is rather simple to utilize the Listen Current quizzes. Just follow these steps:

Copy the code for the desired quiz and go to your Socrative account.

Go to the Manage Quizzes tab and select Create Quiz

Paste in the SOC- # in the Import a Socrative quiz from another teacher box

You can select the quiz settings to control the pace as the teacher or allow the students, as well as whether to display student names and randomize the question order.

Go to your Dashboard tab and select Start a Quiz

Have your students log in as students and give them you classroom number to have them take the quiz.

Engage in Civic Discourse with Daily Read

Civic discourse is an important activity which history teachers must provide models for our students to do so responsibly. This is even more paramount in today’s environment and given the growing concerns regarding digital literacy, social media, and digital citizenship. Daily Read offers a free and engaging way for teachers to engage students in current events and civic discourse. Daily Read articles are available in a variety of topics ranging from US news, world news, arts and culture, science, and business. Students have access to leveled readings, linked articles for further reading, a poll question to take a position on, and a thought provoking question where students take a position, defend their position and type their response.

All one needs to do is sign up for your free Daily Read teacher account. You can have all of your students in a class to interact or separate students by class period and discuss by class period. You can instruct your students which articles to read or let their curiosity guide their reading. From your dash board, you can see the most popular section of articles your students have commented on, the most popular articles, who read what article and when, top commentators, and more. Engage your students.

Flipping for News with Flipboard

Getting students to make connections with content and current events can be a struggle. Sometimes one wishes to categorize news articles by themes. You may want your students to curate news articles or Tweets with news articles or political cartoons by topic or unit of study. Flipboard allows you to do all of this and more.

I first came to experiment with Flipboard for classroom use after struggling with my students to watch or read the news and connect it to units of study. After thinking of how I was going to support my students, I remembered the magazine feature of Flipboard. I have had positive feedback from this and even have some of my Academy students, think homeroom, reading up on current events on their smart phones.

Flipboard is a fantastic app for viewing and creating news magazines. You will need to sign up and create your account on a smartphone of tablet after you download the app. Once you do this you can create your own magazines and add articles from Flipboard or search for items on Twitter.

Additionally, you can embed an individual magazine onto your class website using their HTML Magazine Widget. To do this, you will first need to go to the Flipboard Editor web page. Select the Magazine Widget. You will need to paste in the public URL for the magazine that you wish to embed. 

Next select the button to the right of the text box and the HTML embed code will appear in a box below. 

Copy this code and enter into your embed code box if you are using Weebly or follow the embed/HTML protocol of the website maker you are using. Now, your magazine will be integrated into your website page.

Another feature that Flipboard offers if you are 1:1 with ipads is that you can share the magazine and students can comment on the articles while they are in the app…like a discussion board.

Additionally, you could have your students create their own Flipboard magazines. When they curate and add an article, you could require them to comment their reaction or connection to a topic of study as well. You would need to have them share their Flipboard magazine with you- this can be done easily with a Google Form.

There are so many wonderful possibilities of ways to integrate Flipboard into your history classroom…get thinking.

Extra, Extra Read All About It...NEWS!

Literacy in history/social studies is expressed through critical thinking, communication of ideas,civic engagement, and global understanding.  To this end, the state of California is moving forward with its Civic Education Initiative. One of the 6 Proven Practices of Civic Education is discussion of current events and controversial issues. Reading the news helps our students to meet these goals and those of the Reading Informational Text strand of the Common Core. We are living in an age where media is at our fingertips...whether at the touch of a keystroke on a computer, tablet or cell phone these days. Four engaging opportunities for our students to access current events are Newsela, Newseum, Newsmap, and Vox. All of these news outlets provide news in an engaging manner to make the content focused and accessible to today's students on their website and through Twitter.

       Newsela 

       Newsela opens up many opportunities for the news and our students with their FREE high interest news articles. Have you had to deal with students in your class at different reading levels? They take news articles from major publications and adapt them to five different reading lexiles. News articles are categorized into seven categories: war and peace, science, kids, money, law, health, and arts. Additionally, some of the articles come with quizzes to check the student's reading comprehension. These articles lend themselves to close reading activities to facilitate reading comprehension.

       Newseum

       Newseum is more than an amazing museum to visit in DC. They also have a host of educational resources in their Digital Classroom, program archives, and their Front Pages is invaluable for current events. Having taught International Relations and World History, the Newseum's Front Pages is a site to keep bookmarked and get your students familiar with. Using their Sort Papers by Region link, you can customize what part of the world to have your students explore. What I loved is for them to see the front pages of different countries. If there was a major international news story played out here in the US, was it positioned so in other countries? This led to some great conversations. In every region they have, we were always able to find at least one newspaper in English. Have your students click on the newspaper and then the blue website hyperlink on the top right of the newspaper front page to see more in that publication--- this can be so eye opening for students. This is also a great resource for students whom English is not their first language and foreign exchange students. Another feature is to search the US headlines to show students how news can be regionalized and illustrate bias.

       Newsmap 

       Newsmap is a great aggregate tool to visualize trending stories. Newsmap categorizes the news into seven color coded categories: world, national, business, technology, sports, entertainment, and health. You can select which categories you wish to display on the bottom right to customize your screen. The larger the box, the more the topic is trending. Again, this is a great visual tool for students. Hover over of click on the box to read the article. You can also select region and language options on the top toolbar. This is a great website to use with students when you are wanting them to research or select news stories related to a particular category.

       Vox 

       

       Vox is a general news site with a mission to EXPLAIN the news. This is the project of journalist and blogger Ezra Kline launched this month. So far it looks great. The home page lists current news articles, Understand the News with related articles and fact cards to help one better understand the topic, videos, and conversations. The articles sometimes contain highlights of key items and include hyperlinks to provide contextual information for portions of the articles. What myself and some of the students have found useful are the fact cards. Theses are great for helping students understand the context and key points, especially in world events. The cards are also easy to share as a deck on Twitter or print out for a classroom jigsaw activity. Vox is looking like a resource to keep our eyes on and I'm looking forward to using this with my students. Again, another great source for close reading activities with students.