|
December 15, 2001
Awards of Excellence (cont'd)
By Kristen Kennedy
The Top Award Winners
CNNfyi.com (Turner Learning, Inc.)
Judges raved about CNNfyi's current-events site for secondary students and teachers: "Teachers can use the site to develop lesson plans, and students can use it to develop critical-thinking skills while investigating age-appropriate treatment of world events." Thematic organization of feature stories, quick quizzes and trivia questions, and daily updates to student and teacher materials are just a few of the convenient features that make this in-school news service stand apart from the rest. Sequencing, design, and ease of use were all described in the superlative, as well.
CNNfyi.com offers students more than just news stories, too. Video clips, youth-specific topics, homework help, and CNNSB, CNN's official student news-gathering and reporting program, can also be found at the site. In addition to lesson plans, teachers will find activities correlated to the daily news, with weekly discussion guides and curriculum-specific learning units, and even professional development activities. CNNfyi's full-spectrum content, tools, and areas for student participation, not to mention its expanded subject-area resources provided by Harcourt and Riverdeep Interactive, make this news provider the top dog in online current-events programming.
Web site. Price: Free. (Grades 6-12.)
TI InterActive, CBL 2, and TI-83 Silver Edition (Texas Instruments)
Texas Instruments took home a total of four awards this year: three for the individual pieces of this science and math package and one top award for all three in combination. The TI triad, as we call it, won accolades for its unique integration of word processing, math functions, and data collection tools. The new TI-83 Silver Edition graphing calculator synchs up with the CBL 2 data-gathering probes. TI InterActive software can then be used to collect and graph data from the calculator, create new graphs and tables, and produce polished written reports.
Judges felt that this combined package created a powerful interdisciplinary resource that opens new forays into learning by putting a variety of multiuse tools in students' hands. What gives this multi-modal package the edge are its cross-curricular applications that encourage kids to use technology at key moments in the process of problem solving. From the initial data collection stage to the ultimate sharing of field reports with peers, the Texas Instruments package takes students through the investigative stages of scientific inquiry. An added feature is that teachers can buy these tools as a package or individually. Each of these Texas Instruments offerings is a winner in its own right, and together, they take home the top award.
Hardware/software bundle. Price:
TI InterActive, $64.95; CBL 2, $165; TI-83 Silver Edition, $129.
TI Interactive, CBL 2, and TI-83 Silver Edition
Views and Voices: America in Vietnam (SAS inSchool)
This top winner caught the judges' eyes for its brilliant collection of primary-source multimedia materials devoted to bringing students the complex history of the Vietnam War through the eyes of those involved, from Vietnamese and American perspectives to those of soldiers and students. Moreover, America in Vietnam gathers the myriad, divergent voices of the Vietnam conflict in a more thoughtful and thorough manner than we've seen to date. First-person narratives of those who fought in the war meet official government documents for a realistic view of a dissonant time in American history.
The message to students is that history is a complex web of contraries, and arriving at a singular vision or "truth" is a matter of interpretation, hard research, and speculative inquiry. To this end, America in Vietnam presents media case studies for individual or collaborative student groups. While the program falls squarely in the Social Studies category, judges responded only with praise to the cross-disciplinary approach used to create these analytical writing and research projects, not to mention the key research and critical-thinking skills students build when discerning among competing historical documents.
Server-based with Win CD. Contact publisher for individualized pricing options. (Grades 9-12.)
Return to Intro > > >
Read other articles from the December Issue
Send a letter to the Editor in response to this article.
|
