8th graders at @The_School are required to watch CNN Student News for Homework:

I was making “the rounds” this morning, and popped in on Monica Amaro‘s 8th Grade Social Studies class just as they started watching CNN Student News together. Kids were required to summarize in their journals 3 key points from the 10-minute segment. Monica screens it every morning before school so that she can discuss the topics with her students whether or not they watch it together in class (which they do about once a week). She says she got the idea to incorporate CNN Student News from Catherine Georges who teaches 7th Grade Social Studies here at The School at Columbia University.
CNN Student News on Twitter: @CNNStudentNews

CNN Student News website: http://www.cnn.com/studentnews/

6th graders are uploading/sharing their finished StoryCorps-esque interviews today

For one of their final projects of the year, 6th graders created a short audio piece inspired by StoryCorps. Monica Amaro (6th Social Studies teacher) and Marisa Mendez (6th English teacher) paired up to lead this project which was a lovely culmination of the 6th grade’s year-long theme: How History Shapes My Identity.

StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives. Since 2003, StoryCorps has collected and archived more than 40,000 interviews from nearly 80,000 participants. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to share, and is preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. StoryCorps is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind, and millions listen to our weekly broadcasts on NPR’s Morning Edition and on our Listen pages.

Students interviewed someone at home and used Garageband to extract a 2-3 minutes story. These audio pieces were exported as .m4a files and then converted to either .mp4 or .mov files that were then uploaded to TheTube (our internal video server powered by Drupal). Finally, students gathered links to their audio files, a description of their piece, a direct quote from the story, and an image. These were added to a table on a collaborative GoogleDoc to loosely model how StoryCorps organizes their files.

Just learned about the new Google Docs Research tool via @moniamaro59

I’m collaborating with 6th grade Social Studies teacher Monica Amaro (@moniamaro59)  on an iMovie project where here students will research topics about the culture, religion, architecture, medicine, food, language, politics, etc. of Tenochtitlan, Mexico. They’ll be gathering their research in Google Docs. Monica just showed me something that one of her 6th graders showed her: Google Docs now has a Research Tool that allows embeds a right-side column for you to google websites, images, quotes, and scholarly writings about the topic.

The most satisfying feature for us so far is that when you located images, they are embedded into your Google Doc and their location is cited in a footnote at the bottom of the page. There is no excuse for forgetting to cite your sources anymore!

I found the article below about using the embedded Google Doc’s new Research Tool here:

How to use Google Docs’ new Research tool: New feature automates research process, making it easier for everyone

By Leslie Meredith

Whether you’re a student facing final papers or a parent helping kids with research assignments, Google has just made the process a lot easier with a new tool that automates the research process.

Simply called “Research,” the tool lets you conduct searches for terms related to your document or search for just quotes or images from a panel that appears to the right of your document.

Searching for a location automatically brings up a Google map that you can insert as is or edit by zooming in or out. Photos can be filtered to include only those that are licensed for free use — a good idea to avoid copyright problems.

For Web page results, hover over the link to see a preview of the page. Like what you see? Click “insert link” to add it to your text.

Further, the Research tool lets you insert a citation, automatically formatted, into your document.

Here’s how it works: After you’ve inserted a link, click “cite.” Google will add a superscript footnote number to the link in your text and generate a properly constructed footnote at the bottom of the page.

There are three ways to activate the research panel. Within an open document, go to the “Tools” menu at the top of the page and select “Research.” You can also use a keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Alt+R on a PC and Command+Option+R on a Mac. To jumpstart the process, you can right-click on a word or highlight a phrase to launch a search for your term.

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