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I believe keeping students up to date on world events is important, even in the non-social studies classroom - especially with large-scale, important events, like the current BP oil spill.There are lots of resources available that teachers can introduce students to, which they can then explore further on their own, to learn more about the spill - here are the ones I think are the most informative as well as being appealing to students.
- BP's Official Website is currently brimming over with information about the spill and cleanup efforts. Unique information I found here were videos explaining the technology being used to try and stop the spill - just make sure to remind students that this information may be biased.
- The House Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming has a multimedia, frequently updates press release on the spill that is almost as big as their name! At this site, students can find comprehensive coverage and a multitude of links detailing how the spill happened and current cleaup and stoppage efforts.
- Finally, we have the PBS/NPR Gulf Oil Tracker Widget, displayed below.
This widget not only displays the live video feed coming from the BP ROV at the site of the spill, but also has an adjustable estimated gallons leaked to date meter, which can be adjusted to accomodate the wide variety of estimates currently circulating.
You could present or explore these resources in class as much as you wanted - from devoting a whole class period to a brief overview in as little at 10 minutes. The important thing is that students can continue to explore these resources outside of the classroom.
It now seems like the whole world uses Google as their default search engine - and why not? With features such as image-specific searches, maps, and even the ability to search only for scholarly articles, I believe Google has earned their reputation as the #1 search engine with their constant innovations and improvements.
Despite this, the fact is that different search engines often turn up different results, and we would be doing our students a disservice if we didn't help them find the widest range of helpful information possible. Now, we could have them use all 4 major search engines separately - but that's not necessary.
There's an easy way to search all of the top search engines at one time, and the device that does it is called a metasearch engine. My personal favorite is Dogpile, with its uncluttered main page and options for regular searches as well as image and video-specific ones. In addition, Dogpile has some great information about metasearch engines and their advantages.
Teaching your students about metasearch engines can make their searches for relevant information easier, as well as helping them save time by using one instead of searching seperately on each major search engine.
Goodreads is a site that lets users track what books they are reading, rate and review books they have read, see what friends on the site are reading and get reccommendations from them, and more. Not only is this site a great for already avid readers (I knew about and was using it well before taking this class!), but it can also make a great tool for generating interest in reading among students. With the site, students can review books that they have read as well as read their frends' reviews; if they have blogs, they can even use the Goodreads gadget to display the books they have recently read - you can see my gadget displayed in the column on the left. Goodreads even has video 'trailers' of books - something that I think could get even the most stubborn students interested in reading. Here's the trailer for Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games:
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