Teaching with News

Newseum

Newseum Washington, DC's Most Interactive Museum is the site of the Newseum - a 250,000-square-foot museum of news which offers an experience of blending five centuries of news history with technology and hands-on exhibits.

Today's Front Pages section could be a nice teaching tool for a lot of tasks: warming-up, motivating the discussion, the source of information for students' projects. The students can search for the needed information, compare the front pages of  newspapers from one and the same and from different countries and continents.



One more interesting thing from the Newseum is NewsMania - "the news trivia game as fresh as today's headlines". It has three levels - Intern, Reporter, Editor - offering questions with multiple-choice answers. But even if you're wrong (the questions are not easy at all) the correct answer is given.



NewsCred

NewsCred - Create and Discover Newspapers About the Things You Love - not only shows the Breaking News but also suggests creating your own online newspaper in 60 seconds. This could be a wonderful idea for students to present their projects, to create their class or group newspaper, just to be a good way to try themselves in the newswriting sphere.

The Newspaper Clipping Generator

Other ideas from fodey.com can also be very interesting to students:
Create... .. a newspaper .. ninja text .. a clapper board .. wizard text .. talking squirrels .. talking flowers .. talking tomatoes .. talking cats .. talking owls Just for fun! Why not?

More from BBC

BBC offers a nice Better@Languages questionnaire with the 9 questions and the advice on making the most of one's strengths and overcoming one's weaknesses. Choosing between True and False variants the person gets a piece of advice on each of the 9 questions.

One more great resource from BBC. Beyond the Postcard is a series about not so well known features of some well known places (Edinburgh, Belfast, York and others). Text, video, audio comprehension exercises will help practise and improve one's English. 
More about BBC resources in BBC News Video Post

Topics Online Magazine

 Topics Online Magazine for Learners of English is really a magazine full of interesting topics both to enjoy reading and to use for a lesson. It's International and Meeting People sections are of special interest.

Teach with Google

Google Art Project On the Google Art Project website, you can visit famous museums from all around the world - Madrid, New York City, Berlin, London and elsewhere - and explore famous art pieces. The Google Art Project is easy  for children to explore, making it effective even in elementary school. You can select from the list of museums, and then choose whether you want to explore the museum itself, or start examining the work of art.  Navigating down the hallways and rooms of an art museum gets kids really excited.

Google Culture Institute is the collection of 42 online exhibits telling the stories behind major events the period 1905 - 2008 (The Holocaust, Apartheid, D-Day). The exhibits contain text, photo and video information. 

Cookie and others

Cookie offers more than your traditional games website. It features educational games chosen by child experts and educators. It contains worksheets, educational videos and stories to help children develop basic skills and have fun while they learn. Games and activities help develop language, math, reading, science and general problem-solving skills. The site is brightly colored and pictures, containing many things the children will enjoy not only at school but also at home.

City of Grammaropolis - a wonderful grammar reasource introducing the parts of speech in all the details with funny cartoon characters. The site offers various activities on each part of speech - the pictured description, colorful on-line comics, videos, quizzes and games, songs. Grammaropolis is a fresh and exciting way to learn about the parts of speech. Students associate human qualities and characteristics with the parts of speech, abstract grammatical rules start to make a lot of sense.

e-Learning for Kids offers interactive material for a number of subject areas: Math World, Math General, Language Arts Courses, Science Courses, Computer, Environmental Skills, Health, Life Skills, English Language. In each group the materal is presented by the courses for different ages. The courses are mainly interactive animated slides.

Downloadable Educational Freeware

Artha is a free English thesaurus that works off-line and is based on WordNet. It is available for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows. For a given word, the possible relatives shown by Artha includes Derivatives, Synonyms, Antonyms and many more. 




Seterra is a Windows-based application that makes geography interesting for students, and presents geographic facts  in a format that is easier to remember. It is like a free map quiz game, but it actually serves as a good educational tool for both the classroom and the home. 




and many others at Educational Freeware

Phonetics Focus

Phonetics Focus offers a wide range of resources, designed to help improve pronunciation and knowledge of phonics. It is good for working with students in class, practise individually, use materials to prepare for a lesson.

Confusing Words

ConfusingWords is a list of commonly confused English word pairs. Each pair is given the definition, the examples, True or False and Drag and Drop exercises. Very useful to have such a list at hand.

Visuwords

Visuwords is both a dictionary and a thesaurus, finds  the meanings of words and associations with other words and concepts, produces something like a net of the word.

VocabAhead

VocabAhead is a great vocabulary-learning site illustrating words with nice short videos (picture, definition, example). It makes learning words both fun and interactive, being extremely good and convenient both for students and teachers.

is on the VocabAhead Page of this blog.