Today I want to give a shout out for
#newsengagementday
On Tuesday, October 1, 2019, everyone is encouraged to read, watch, like, tweet, post, listen to, or comment on news, and learn news reporting principles.
This year will be the 6th News Engagement Day and I really encourage you to get your students participating in this annual event. Democratic, republican government is dependent on citizens being informed. Today our students have easy access to news, but they need the skills to evaluate the news more so than ever. Social studies is where students learn these skills and the news should provide relevance for social studies topics.
Super busy teaching those TEKS. We know that, so how about posting a news story and have students comment about the story in their notebooks. Further the activity by having students' get their parents to comment and students respond to that comment. You could do this to observe News Engagement Day or on other periodic occasions, especially when a news story particularly connects to the content you are studying. Here is a resource created to introduce students to news literacy. I also encourage you to check out Media Wise and Stanford History Education Group. The two have teamed up to create lessons about evaluating online news sources. The lessons are supposed to be available this fall. Additionally, the two groups have collaborated with John Green from Crash Course to create a video series on navigating digital information.
News Engagement Day and teaching digital literacy provides an opportunity for collaboration with the other subject areas. Let your colleagues know about these resources, especially your librarian.
My colleagues and I used to joke about, "What do you think math teachers discuss at lunch?" Probably the news was our guess, since we thought current events would be more intriguing than parabolas. Basically, social studies topics like economics, government, geography, etc. would be involved in their discussions. This may or may not be true. We just believed that social studies, including the news is engaging for everyone.
Renee Blackmon
TCSS Curriculum Liaison