News for the Classroom

YouTube and the rest of the web has made it easy for individuals to produce their own newscasts. Techcrunch reports that Morgan Webb has started a new news videocast in which she'll report on the current events of the day, using blogs as a main source of information and commentary.

As somebody who is particularly interested in current events, I often wonder if there's anything that I could do with videocasting that would support teaching and learning in the classroom. As my readers know I regularly write questions designed to promote discussion of current events. But it's a lot easier to write questions that teachers could ask than it is to actually ask the questions on a videocast myself. After all, in order to properly use these questions in a classroom teachers must be able to facilitate high quality discussions, which often means saying nothing but allowing students to contemplate quietly and engage one another. I'm not sure if this could be done in a videocast.