A Short Explanation of Party Conventions

If you're discussing the Republican National Convention with your students this week, they might be wondering why conventions are held and what happens at the convention. CNN has an "explain it to me" video that addresses those points. As always, you may want to talk with your students about the role of bias in news media when you use current events clips in your classroom.

Thanks to Larry Ferlazzo and Glen Wiebe for sharing this video early this week.

Video - The Complexities of Gold

CNN's Explain It To Me video series attempts to take complex topics and break them down into clear explanations. One of the videos that I recently watched is Gold. Explain It To Me: Gold explains why gold is a prized metal, why investors like it, and offers some advice for those considering investing in gold.


Applications for Education
Explain It To Me: Gold could be a good video to use as part of an introductory lesson on the value of currency or as part of an introductory lesson on investment.

Explain It To Me Explains Iran

I'm kind of hooked on CNN's Explain It To Me series of videos. Each video offers a nice, succinct explanation of topics in the news. One that I watched early this morning is an explanation of Iran's nuclear program and the concerns it causes. The short video is appropriate for use with high school students in a current world news course.



To follow-up on the video above, ThinkFinity has a good list of lesson plans for teaching about nuclear energy. Here is a short video explanation of how a nuclear reactor works.

Explain It To Me Explains Concussions

When I was playing sports in school I don't think anyone ever mentioned the word concussion to us. Subsequently, I'm sure that one or more of my classmates had undiagnosed concussions. Fortunately, that is not the case for today's student-athletes. Today, we hear about concussions in professional and amateur athletes quite frequently. But what is a concussion and how do they happen? Dr. Sanjay Gupta explains the answers to those questions and more in the episode of CNN's Explain It To Me series embedded below.

Video - What is an IPO?

The tech and business worlds have been buzzing all week about the seemingly impending Facebook IPO. Your students may have heard about it too. This would be a good a time to teach students about how companies end up on the stock market and why they offer shares in their companies. CNN's Explain It To Me series has a new video explaining what an IPO is and why companies like Facebook put shares up for sale. The video is embedded below or you can watch it here.

Two Short Tuesday Primary Videos

Very early this morning the first votes in the New Hampshire primary were cast. The town of Dixville Notch, New Hampshire had nine voters show up just after midnight to be the first to cast their votes. CNN has a short video about Dixville Notch's voters and why New Hampshire is so important today.



On a much lighter note, comedian Bob Marley (a Mainer like me) went to New Hampshire to "investigate" the primaries. The video does mention drinking at about the 1:30 mark, but otherwise is appropriate for school.