There is so much happening in the world now and so quickly, but with social media and other online sources, knowing about it is much easier than ever before.
As a journalism teacher, it is essential to teach students how to harness the news of the day and localize it for their readers on our online media site wjpsnews.com. And Twitter just made that easier.
With their new Moments feature, students and teachers can quickly gather important news that has already been curated from other places.
What Moments does, is put together a series of multimedia tweets that tell a more dynamic story about any one event. They are selected based on trends happening at the time.
Moments is split into a few key categories which makes searching even easier:
- Today (which is the default)
- News
- Sports
- Entertainment
- Fun
Within each sub-sect, there are top stories and within the stories a series of tweets, some consisting of pictures and others short video.
This feature will make Twitter even more valuable to the classroom for any teacher who wants to draw in current events to their lessons. You don’t need to be a social studies or journalism teacher to enjoy and use this function, because the variety of news is so vast, it is good for all teachers to help make those real world connections that can sometimes seem elusive.
For example, today’s key stories include:
- The Royals winning the World Series
- Red Cups returning to Starbucks
- The Hollywood Film Awards
- Former Senator Fred Thompson dies
- New York City Marathon
- NFL Week 8
- World Indigenous Games 2015
- Republicans gather for Iowa GOP event
- Russian plan crashes in Egypt
- How serious is Indonesia’s haze crisis?
- And there are many more based on the category
Whether searching on mobile devices or laptops and desktops, find moments under the lightning bolt and you won’t be disappointed. The stories and events are updated throughout the day making sure the most current news is what is most prominently listed.
From serious to whimsical, there is something on the Moments feature for everyone. This is a great new way to quickly teach students to search current events and/or make connections to their current learning.
How will you use this new feature with your students or for your own learning? Please share