Engage, inform, and educate your students with TweenTribune. TweenTribune lets students interact with the news, while fulfilling requirements for language arts, computer skills, and other classes. Here’s how TweenTribune works. Each weekday, they search for and highlight the Web for age-appropriate news stories that will interest teenagers and invite them to comment. All comments are moderated before publishing, so it’s Web-safe.
Teachers can customize TweenTribune for their classroom. Register your classroom with TweenTribune and once your class starts using TweenTribune, the site will automatically generate custom pages showing:
- The stories your class has commented upon
- Individual comments by each student, on his or her own page
- All comments by your students, in one report that can be sorted by students’ names, comments, or dates
- You moderate, edit, or delete your students’ comments before they’re published.
TweenTribune’s
Top 10 Lesson Plans
- Kill three birds with one stone: Meet requirements for reading, writing and computer technology.
- Encourage expression: Pick a controversial story and ask students to post a persuasive argument for their opinion. Or ask students to find a comment they disagree with, then ask them to post facts that make an effective, opposing argument.
- Teach basic online skills to the youngest students: Sign up, log in, browse and blog.
- Tap the topic you teach. If you teach Science, ask your students to comment on Science stories. If you teach Art, Health, World History or Technology, there’s a topic for you.
- Start a conversation. Ask every student to blog on a particular story, then use their responses as the basis for classroom discussion.
- Divide and conquer. Grade your students on spelling, punctuation & grammar on Week 1, then oral expression on Week 2, then written communication on Week 3. Create rubrics for each, then rinse and repeat. New stories appear every day, so there’s no risk of repetition.
- Test comprehension. Ask students to post a summary of the day’s top stories to demonstrate that they understand.
- Foster collaboration. Ask teams of students to present a “newscast” based on the stories they like best.
- Publish student writing and share it with the world: Book reviews, poetry, opinions, classroom projects, etc.
- Make it a homework assignment. TweenTribune is where kids are when they’re at home – on the computer.
