Teaching With the NY Times: A Virtual Summit
Role at Burke's: Librarian and Digital Media Specialist
Workshop Name or Project Title: Teaching with the NY Times: A Virtual Summit
When did this Opportunity take place? March 2022
Summary of workshop/opportunity: An overview of the New York Times' educational resources and the innovative ways they can be used in the classroom.
Goals & Collaborations
What were your big takeaways from your workshop or project? The NY Times and The Learning Network offer a huge number of interesting resources to supplement almost every area of learning. There are class openers to get students thinking and sharing (What's Going on in this Picture? What's Going on in this Graph?), writing prompts, the Hyphen-Nation video series, the Headway project (looking at progress and possibility through the lens of events in recent history), the Times Machine for archival content, lesson plans, mentor texts, author annotations, and more. I was interested in this training because I have previously integrated NY Times' educational resources into advisory and HEART, but the content is really intended for 8th grade and beyond (with an emphasis on high school). However, I believe that many of these resources have the power to be extremely powerful in a 7th or 8th grade classroom with adaptation. They could also encourage interdepartmental collaboration.
How does what you learned connect to your goals this year? I am always looking for new resources to add to the Library's collection. While we have a print subscription to the New York Times, much of their Learning Network content is available to digital subscribers only and cost-prohibitive, especially if underutilized. To make this decision, I will take some time to speak with 7th and 8th grade teachers to see whether and how they might make use of these resources.
How might this opportunity lead to collaboration with other faculty? These resources could encourage a number of collaborations with other faculty, whether using the NY Times Machine to research the archives for a particular subject, exploring the social implications of a new scientific discovery for a science-history/social studies collaboration (e.g. Headway's series on the peat lands in Democratic Republic of Congo), a collaboration between math and virtually any other subject using What's Going on in this Graph, or a History/English/Makery collaboration using Hyphen-Nation. This just barely scratches the surface, and the opportunities are endless.
6. Would you recommend this opportunity? Yes
This was great!