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http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/fil/pages/listcolumbinjo.html
With the terrible news from Colorado last week this site offers resources
for dealing with violence and grief. Topics include: Messages to Columbine
High School, Warning Signs, Teacher Talk: Violence in the Schools, and
Educators for Social Responsibility. One site "Grief Support on the WWW"
looks like it could be very useful for many different events in your
students lives.
The Columbine High School Tragedy is hosted by Pacific Bell and is suitable
for teachers of grades K-12.
http://school.discovery.com/fall98/activities/childrenofwar/index.html
The Discovery Channel School has placed online an activity
related to its "World in Conflict" theme. Involving language
arts, history, sociology, psychology, and media literacy,
this unit can be modified for use with students from Grade 6
through to Grade 12.
With children's war diaries as a central focus, learners are
guided through the creation of a public service announcement
designed to inform a target audience about children's rights
during wartime. There are plenty of links to appropriate
contextual material, questions to guide discussions and more.
http://www.inac.gc.ca/news/jan97/9702bk2.html
Establishing the Nunavut Territory
On April 1, 1999, the map of Canada will change to include
the new territory of Nunavut. Covering 1,900,000 square
kilometres (roughly one-fifth of Canada's land mass) this
northern space will be the home of only 22,000 people.
The above websites offer information about the geography,
environment and culture of this new territory. With maps,
and pictures along with links to educational, government,
land claim issues and more, there is plenty to explore at
these sites.
At these final two sites you'll be able to
listen to some Inuktitut (the language of the Inuit people,
who are the majority of Nunavut residents) songs, words and
place names.
Inuktitut - The Language of the Inuit People
Interactive Mapping from the Nunavut Planning Commission:
Hosted by the University of California, Berkeley, the above site
offers links to information and images related to the recent
nuclear tests.
A wide range of viewpoints is represented, with government
sites, anti-nuclear agencies and action groups, research
sites, news, opinion polls and more.
This type of resource exemplifies the power of the web.
Here learners can review and analyze many sources of
information and form their own viewpoints.
http://www.aacap.org/publications/policy/ps23.htm Policy Statement on Firearm Safety
"Today's shooting at Thurston High School in Springfield,
Oregon should bring every American to the realization that
the tragedy of kids and guns will not go away - and is,
in fact, escalating" is Sarah Brady's statement, released
May 21, 1998, on the "Handgun Control" page.
Students, teachers, and parents everywhere are asking
the unthinkable question "why do children kill?"
If we knew the answer, we would make it stop, wouldn't
we?
You might want to look at the American Academy of Child
and Adolescent Psychiatry's Policy Statement on Firearm
Safety. You might also want to revisit CLN's Youth Violence
Theme Page (both above) as well as the many online news sources (such as CNN, Yahoo
News and others listed below on this page) offering updated reports and links to
background information on this new story. Some of these
resources also have spaces for online public comment.
When I last looked, the CNN discussion forum had close
to 2000 postings.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/marsnews Jet Propulsions Laboratory, Mars Mission News
Above are the official websites, with pictures, overviews
of the Mars mission.
Although disappointing to some, the photographs are a
great starting point for conversations about the reasons
why we search for intelligence throughout the universe.
http://www.webwombat.com.au/intercom/newsprs/index.htm Webwombat
Understanding world events has never been an easy task. Now,
with so many sources of news available via the Internet, we
have the opportunity to compare reports from different places.
This requires us to think deeply in order to interpret the
varying perspectives.
The above sites are vast web-based news sources. 'Webwombat' has
hundreds and hundreds of online newspapers categorized by
country. 'Newsindex' allows you
to search 250 online news sources by keywords and browse
through recent headline topics to link to related reports
from dozens of locations.
With access to such a huge amount of information, how do we
proceed? Cautiously, I hope, and with good critical thinking
skills. Here are two sites with ideas to help students evaluate
what they find in the news:
How to Analyze News:
http://www.screen.com/mnet/eng/med/class/teamedia/newse.htm
Or, a different starting point might be the Canadian Daily
Newspaper Association's web page, where students can link
to Canadian Newspapers online, find out about careers in the
news industry, peruse data about circulation and readership,
and perhaps begin to think critically about a statement of
principles for the news industry which includes the following
sentiment:
Unicef estimates that there are over 100 million landmines
strewn in 70 countries throughout the world. As you may know,
a conference is taking place this week in Ottawa, to discuss
a Nobel-prize winning plan to eliminate landmines forever.
There are many websites that address this issue. I'm
pointing you to a few, and your web searching skills can
help you find dozens more.
SafeLane (Canada's federal government site to support a
world-wide ban on Anti-Personnel Mines):
OneWorld Landmines Special Report (updated frequently):
Unicef's "The Legacy of Land-mines":
CNN's "World News" (coverage of the conference):
Yahoo News/Top Stories is a place where the current headlines and summaries are available. Things are updated frequently here (the summaries are updated on an hourly basis), making this a great source of information for an overview of late-breaking news. The archives allow you to catch up on items you've missed and it's sometimes interesting to review how interpretations of events change over time, as more details become available.
Imagine a current events web site that has been designed by
and for Canadian K-12 education.
If you could create a wish-list, you'd probably ask for a
summary of the day's top stories. You might also include a
request for lesson ideas, for links to related information on
the internet, and, if you're like me, you'd likely also want
a searchable archive of all previous news items and background
information so you could track the sequence of events as the
world unfolds.
Ron Jeffrey of the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) has
done all of the above along with some excellent lesson plans for
the study of media literacy.
The site is designed for users of "Cable in the Classroom",
but I'd suggest that you take a look at this site as a
resource to accompany any approach you take to the study
of current events.
To access the search engine directly, link to: http://newsworld.cbc.ca/search.html
The Virtual Global Learner Centre is a BC site providing
online resources for teachers interested in developing a
global education theme within their curricula. Topics include
food security, human rights, peace and conflict resolution,
gender equity and multiculturalism.
You can browse through a set of activities that can be used
in the classroom, link to resources, participate in discussions,
or make use of VIDEA's (the Victoria International Development
Education Association) researchers to get further information
on global education.
That "refugees are a painful living reminder of the failure of
societies to exist in peace," is an eloquent statement
found at the the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR) website.
This site contains lesson ideas and information especially
for K-12 teachers to help them use the topic of refugees
to shed light on a variety of subjects that are important
to their students.
Two sites with excellent collections of newspapers from every
corner of the globe can be viewed as follows:
http://www.intercom.com.au/intercom/newsprs/index.htm
The free access newspaper web pages that can be found at the above links are becoming widely available
and they often have more than just the headlines. Many of them
have built-in links to relevant stories from the archives, some
have discussion forums and some are keyword searchable.
With over 40 Canadian Newspapers at each of the above sites and an untold
number of international newspapers, anyone with internet
access (and some of that precious commodity called "spare time")
can become extremely well-informed.
As you might expect, not everything is in English, but some
of the foreign sites do provide English text. For example
weekly updates about events in Russia are available in English
via the online edition of the St Petersburg Times and also
through the Moscow Times. "Athens News" provides Greek news
items in English, Japan offers the "Asahi Evening News " and
there seem to be many others in English.
Canada's "Globe and Mail" newspaper offers a web page
dedicated to the discussion of selected issues that have
made recent news and are of importance to Canadians. October 96
topics included the changing state of society, recommended
ways to discipline children (to spank or not to spank),
Canada's place in the world, and the status of the Canadian
Armed Forces.
What differentiates this discussion forum from some of the
others (giving it a great deal of potential to be useful
educationally) is its organizational structure. The forum is
moderated, the key issues are summarized, and there are links
to related documents that can help you understand various
viewpoints.
The "Our Home/Notre Foyer" site is for elementary students
who want to learn about communities across Canada. Research
has been conducted by students who live in each community
and is available in French and English.
The "best things" and "things to change" sections are part of
a format for research that could be duplicated by kids anywhere.
It might be interesting to generate a set of categories for
your students to conduct parallel research about their own
communities before they explore this web site.
If you have a graphical browser, the maps are a nice way to
access the information. If you're in text-only mode, the
content is still worth exploring and can be easily aligned
with the map on your classroom wall.
Thanks to William Morrison of Qualicum, B.C. for this idea.
PBS, the Public Broadcasting System that we know from TV,
and MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, have created an "Online
Newshour" web page, with frequent updates of the daily
news, forums for the discussion of current events, essays
(try Gergen's "Wagging the Dog" for a stimulating start
to a class discussion of technology) and a searchable
archive. Scroll down this page to some other newsites, then engage what I believe is one of the internet's
finest educational opportunities -- comparing different
perspectives on world events as they are happening.
Columbine High School Tragedy
Children of War
Nunanvut
http://npc.nunavut.ca/ Nunavut Planning Commission
http://www.ccu-cuc.ca/en/library/nunavut.html Nunavut Virtual Library
http://www.arctic.ca/LUS/Inuktitut.html
http://npc.nunavut.ca/eng/intermap/
Nuclear testing in India and Pakistan
Oregon Tragedy
http://www.cln.org/themes/youth_violence.html Youth Violence Theme Page
Face on Mars
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov Planetary Photo Journal
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov Mars Global Surveyor Home Page
News on the Web
http://www.newsindex.com/ Newsindex
Media Awareness Network (Canadian site in English and French):
http://www.screen.com/mnet/
"The operation of a newspaper is a public trust and its
overriding responsibility is to the society it serves."
Landmines
http://www.mines.gc.ca/
http://www.oneworld.org/guides/landmines/index.html
http://www.unicef.org/sowc96/9ldmines.htm
http://cnn.com/WORLD/9712/02/land.mine.conference/
Yahoo News/Top Stories
CBC Newslinks
Virtual Global Learner Centre
Refugee website for Teachers
Community, society, current events, environment, history,
geography, politics, economics, law, etc., can be made more
relevant through an examination of their relationship to the
people who have been forced to leave their homelands to avoid
persecution. Fine arts and literature are other potential
areas for an exploration of the issues faced by refugees.
Newspapers from Around the World
http://www.dds.nl/~kidon/media-link/papers.shtml
GLOBENET - National Issues Forum
http://forum.theglobeandmail.com/forum/nif
Our Home/Notre Foyer
http://ellesmere.ccm.emr.ca/ourhome/ourhome/selectio.html
PBS Online Newshour
http://www1.pbs.org/newshour/textonly/home_text.html
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