Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

The title for this “The Best…” list might not be a great one. This is also going to be a very short list, though I’m hoping to identify additions.

In addition to thinking about how I’m going to help students learn to detect bias and plain falsehoods on various websites (and Langwitches has some great resources on that topic), I’ve been exploring accessible tools that students could use to gain a similar understanding of more mainstream media.

I’ve identified two primary web applications that might be able to help.

One is very new and is called Media Cloud — Visualizations. It’s probably worth reading Read Write Web’s extensive post on the site. In a nutshell, you can identify three media sources from throughout the world and then get a chart for their most frequently used words over the past ninety days or a comparative map showing the depth of coverage of different parts of the world. Both visualizations would be accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners, and the discussion potential is rich.

I posted about the second site, Know The News, last year, and will basically reprint my description here.

It’s part of an organization called Link TV. It appears to be designed to give viewers a perspective on world news that might not be typically seen in the United States, and has an impressive group of funders and Board of Directors.

What I especially like, though, are some of their accessible online student activities in their Know The News section. Not only are they accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners, but they provide opportunities for critical and “higher-order” thinking.

One is a Remixer activity where students can edit news clips of the same event from different countries or networks, add their own commentary, and post it online. Teachers need to register in order for their classes to participate. It appears to be free.

It also has a News Challenge game that can be played without registering. Two different short news clips are shown, and then questions are asked about them.

Finally, in its Watch and Rate exercise, viewers rate different clips on journalistic qualities.

Euronews provides great, and short, online videos, which I’ll talk about in a minute. But first, let me tell you what I found out about the network from Wikipedia:

Euronews is a multilingual and pan-European television news channel launched on January 1, 1993 in Lyon. It covers world news from a European perspective,in many languages. In 2008 Euronews is distributed to 248 million households in 135 countries worldwide. The latest distribution report shows that Euronews is the leading international news channel in Europe. It reached more than 177 million European households by cable, satellite and terrestrial. This compared with 167 million European households for CNN International, 124 million for BBC World News and 65 million for CNBC Europe.

The site has excellent short news videos.  It also has the audio transcription but, unfortunately, it’s right below the video instead of being closed-captioned.  That reduces its benefit to English Language Learners.

One great feature is it’s “No Comment” section.  In it, it shows videos that it believes communicates its message without any commentary.  Those could be interesting for ELL’s to describe.

Because of it being able to provide a European perspective on the news, I believe it belongs on this list.

Geographical Media is the newest addition to this list.  After you register (which is a free and easy process) you can see which topics are being covered in the news media in different parts of the world, and compare the differences.  The site seems to have a number of other features — and it’s not particularly intuitive how to navigate through them — but the site has a lot of potential. I’m still exploring.

Newsy is a site that — in short videos — compares how major news events are covered by media throughout the world.   In some ways, it’s similar to Link TV, which is also on the list.  Newsy, though, isn’t quite as interactive, though you can leave comments if you’re registered.  

The speaking is pretty fast and relatively high-level, so it’s probably only accessible to advanced English Language Learners.  It does provide a transcript to the audio, but it’s not actually closed-captioned.  That doesn’t make it particularly useful to ELL’s.

It’s a well done site.  I’m probably going to be using it more with my International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge class than with my English Language Learners.

I’m very interested in hearing additional suggestions of resources, so please feel free to leave them in the comments section.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.

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