Visually Explore Current Events 100 Images at a Time

In another post earlier today I shared a couple of ways for students to find current events stories by browsing maps. Another way to try to get students interested in news stories is to have them browse through images connected to stories. Ten by Ten is one of my favorite sites for that purpose.

Ten by Ten presents visitors with a grid of 100 images linked to current events stories. Every hour the top 100 news stories from around the world are linked to images on a ten by ten grid. The stories are ranked according to traffic to the articles. Clicking on an image will provide you with more information including links to more articles about the story. (You must allow pop-ups for the article links to work).

Seven Digital Deadly Sins - Good Material for Conversations on Digital Citizenship

Seven Digital Deadly Sins is an interactive story produced by the National Film Board of Canada. The story contains seven chapters each containing short videos, essays, and polls. The videos and essays tell the stories of people suffering from digital sins like greed (illegally downloading media) and wrath (cyberbullying). After reading or watching the stories viewers can vote on questions about what they would do in similar situations.

Applications for Education
Seven Digital Deadly Sins does deal with some content, mostly in the section on lust, that you will want to screen before deciding if it is appropriate for the students in your classroom. On the whole the content of Seven Digital Deadly Sins provides good material for conversations about digital citizenship that go beyond typical digital citizenship lesson plans.

Two Ways to Explore the News Through Maps

When teaching students about current events I have always tried to incorporate maps so that students can make a connection to the places that they are reading about. I do this if the story is about something happening in Africa or something happening twenty miles down the road from our community. Newspaper Map and the Breaking News map are both helpful in showing students the connections between story subjects and their corresponding locations.

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.

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.

Applications for Education
A common assignment in social studies courses is to have students find, review, and share current events stories. If your students are studying a particular region of the world, Newspaper Map and Breaking News map could help them find stories related to that region.

A Visual Guide to Creative Commons Licenses

Copyright and Creative Commons Explained by Common Craft is one of my go-to resources when someone asks for materials that they can use to explain Creative Commons to students. This morning through Lifehacker I found a new resource that complements the aforementioned video. Which Creative Commons License is Right for me? is a poster produced by Digital Inspiration. The poster explains the restrictions of each type of Creative Commons license. The original work was created in Polish and was translated for Digital Inspiration. See the poster below.

CK-12 Offers New Apps and New Search Filters

The CK-12 Foundation has been busy creating new things this summer. A new CK-12 Android app was recently released. The Android app, like the iOS app, lets students develop and test their math and science knowledge through thousands of practice questions. Students can sign into a CK-12 account to keep track of their scores on the practice quizzes that they have taken.

The CK-12 website has been updated with new search filters. Teachers and students can now search for materials according to grade level, subject, category, and contributor. Documents found through the search tools no longer need to be downloaded because the CK-12 website has an updated, integrated document viewer. Watch the video below to learn more about searching for resources on CK-12.