by Bonnie Bracey-Sutton

The Newseum is a treasure chest of resources for teachers. I attended a teacher workshop that was interesting, exciting and which provided many resources to use in understanding the news.

News is the power in Washington DC.without any lessons, but it is imperative to have a handle on what is news.

.

The city of Washington , DC is all about news.

What is News?

Today, there is constant news that comes from television, radio, the Internet, and other sources. People have access to ways of resourcing news using technology , being able to gather resources in photos,radio, videos, and print. The news is constantly evolving and changing even in a day. We create news with our devices.

To help teachers teach, the Newseum offers many resources. These were shared in a workshop for teachers and many resources are also available on the new Newseum website. The Newseum says that there is more to every story.http://www.newseum.org/

We gathered and selected workshops to be involved in.

An added benefit was that we met teachers from many schools and we networked and shared ideas. But the main ideas we shared were focused on seeing the news , understanding it, and learning how to let students think about how news is gathered. It was fun to do a newsletter on the Civil War. Why? We had to report from the Northern point of view or the Southern point of view , and we had real life examples to look at and see .. just how the news can be slanted , or even wrong. It was fun to see how wrong some of the news was at that time.

We had a workshop to think , decide, talk about what makes the news and what is news today vs. news before all of the digital platforms.

                                                    What a Building!!

The building itself teaches. As you wander around there is so much to see and learn. This video gives you some idea of how immersive and interesting the site itself is.There is a glass elevator that ascends to the television studio and showroom. There is a cafeteria and a gift shop and the usual tourist amenities and you can pre-arrange parking.

The Newseum

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6MAECOCeZQ

We as teachers were involved in various types of lessons to teach us how to use the news, and to teach how to get a perspective on the news.

My choices initially did not use much technology in the lessons, though they were very  interactive. There are digital lessons from the museum and one of the workshops was to learn how to use the new digital platform which is here.

                 This is the Newseum Digital Classroom 

                  http://www.newseum.org/education/resources/

Here you can log in and have access to the digital resources, and get information the process is easy.There are 15 galleries, 15 theaters and lots of gallery space. Then there are the television tours and workshops. So much to see.

Students in the Washington DC Metropolitan area and that includes the whole metropolitan area get to visit the Newseum free of charge. Register for a free visit. For students coming to Washington for a class trip, the Newseum makes it easy to organize a visit. It is worth the trip!!