Kolbe Gray
COOL TOOLS FOR SCHOOLS
In this lesson, I chose to focus on the article, 50 Ways to Teach With Current Events, from the Learning Network. As a Social Studies teacher, news literacy is something that is extremely important to me, as is connecting the past to present day and ultimately to the every day lives of my students. Fantasy Geopolitics is a fantastic way to get students interested in current events. It allows students to select a team of countries, in a very similar fashion to fantasy football, which is something my students love. They get points for how many times their country appears in news headlines and they compete with other teams. The first time I did this, my students were not prepared for the draft. Most of them had a good first round pick and then fell apart from there. The second time, it was a completely different story. Competition is something that really seems to drive my students. So, they did their research and came to the draft prepared the second time. Fortunately for me, doing their research simply meant they were watching or reading the news. The only problem with this is you only get so many accounts for free and then the fee is around $100 for additional accounts.
In addition to Fantasy Geopolitics, I also focused on connecting the past to the present in a recent lesson on the Korean War. So, after teaching the Korean War I asked students the question, Did the Korean War really end? I provided them with a NY Times article on the recent talks between North and South Korea and the United States' role in this. They then further explored current events to make a claim and support their claim with evidence from other current events. This is the link for the original article I provided my students with. www.nytimes.com/2018/04/29/world/asia/north-korea-trump-nuclear.html
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Kolbe Gray
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