After returning from holiday and catching up on reading about the riots here in the UK, I was reminded of a really great web 2.0 tool that I was shown back in March this year by @mikemcsharry at NAACE. It is brilliant but I have just never got round to using it in class but plan to on my return in September.
What is Newsmap? http://newsmap.jp/
It is basically a web tool that visually displays all of the online news using the Google news aggregator that updates every 10 minutes and then displays it as a webpage which you can simply view the headlines of the articles. All you have to do is click on the website and enter a keyword to search it, it is really that easy.
Have a look at the picture below where I searched using the term Riots:
If I then hovered over the 1st article with the headline ‘David Cameron to outline further riot measures’ – it then gives me more information – it then tells me it then tells me the origin of the article, when it was written, how many other related articles there are and the first paragraph that I can skim over, it even includes an image, if the article is of interest I can then click on it and it will direct me to the original article.
There are also additional filters where you can click to search for news articles from specific countries or from all over the world, this search I did just specifically looked at UK, US and Australian articles just by ticking the boxes it is that easy.
If you want to customise things even more then you can sign up for a free account where you can customize the fonts and colour etc.
In a way this is a great free tool to visualize the news over a period of time if you wanted to and see how it changes. There are so many possible ways you could use this in the classroom, my initial thoughts are at the start of a new topic getting students to search for related news articles then looking at patterns and bias from certain countries or news sources. Or perhaps a way of following a real time event that is happening such as a volcanic eruption and monitoring how the news and updates are changes over a set period of time. I am sure for certain subjects it will lend itself really well to many areas of the course.
Have you used Newsmap? Have you any ideas or examples of how it could be used in the classroom?