Everyone with a christchurchschool.org email account has full, free* access to the NY Times online. This means the website, the mobile app, and—yes—even NYT Cooking. (Everything except the crosswords.)

Signing up is easy. There are a few extra steps if you already pay for your own NYT access, but it's still straightforward.

Click the link at the bottom of this page of resources to go to the CCS library website link for Academic Resources—Services & Apps. (or just click here.) This is also the link you can share with your students to help them sign up.

*well, the school pays for it, but it's free to you.

New Resource!!

Video streaming option 1:
academically-focused videos

Tons of truly academic films, historic newsreels, BBC, PBS, National Geographic documentaries, all easily searchable, shareable with students, projectable in class!

There are two ways to access this video database:

1. Alexander Street interface: a modern-looking page that allows you to easily filter results (e.g., only Royal Shakespeare Company films, only PBS films).
   You can access this from on campus without signing on, but when off campus you must either use the second access option (below) and sign on using your CCS Google account, or use the direct CCS logon credentials provided by the librarian. Email the librarian if you need these!
   
    
2. Proquest Academic Video Online interface: a more traditional-looking way to access the database. It searches the exact same films, and you can access this off-campus by using your CCS Google credentials.
   

Teachers: Learn about everything this video resource offers!

1. Here's a guide for teachers on using this platform.
2. Below is a video overview of how it works and some of its super useful features:

Video streaming option 2:
popular & feature films

CCS subscribes to an online academic film streaming service called Swank. Think of it like an "academic Netflix." Essentially, it allows you to stream films in your classroom, or assign students to watch a film at home or on dorm, without requiring anyone to use their own Netflix/Hulu/YouTube TV/etc. streaming account. Most importantly, it allows you to assign films and videos that don't require accessing unlicensed content (i.e., content that violates copyright protections).

Below is a guide explaining the service, and how you can use it in your classroom.

K12 Teacher Guide to academic film streaming.pdf

Students can only watch films that you assign them; they can't browse through the library to find films to watch.

Our license provides a base set of 200 films we can freely assign (these are determined by the vendor).

Additionally, they have many thousands of additional videos we can individually license; once we unlock a film, anyone at school can view it for the rest of the school year. The guide above explains the difference between these two categories, and how to search for films in both categories. If you need a film they carry that we don't have access to, fill out the quick form to request it (don't worry about the reasons for showing the film—the form only goes to the CCS librarian and he trusts your pedagogical impulses, mostly). The only caveat is that some "R" rated films will not show up in the catalog because of public school contractual requirements, so if there's an "R" rated film you are interested in, ask me (librarian, Skip Kempe, a/k/a pkempe@ccs...) and I can email our rep directly to see if it's available on their "hidden" catalog.

LOG IN TO THE STREAMING LIBRARY HERE.

Logging in is easy: both faculty and students simply use your Google CCS credentials. Again, students' accounts only let them view the films that you provide links to. The above link to the streaming catalog, then, will not work for students.

Pedagogical note: while Swank doesn't have rights to every movie ever, if you scroll through you will probably find a film that will work quite well even if your first preference isn’t available. As always, please let me know how I can help you make use of the service. I've found that if I tell them the kind of movie I'm looking for, they often have a few alternatives they can suggest that are in the catalog.

Amazing, reliable resources, centered on three questions at the heart of the COR curriculum:

1. Who's behind the information?
2. What's the evidence?
3. What do other sources say?

The COR curriculum is a great resource for teaching student to navigate the online world of "fake news," but also to help them think more critically about all information they encounter.

Download a single lesson or the full curriculum. Either way, you get classroom-ready materials. Integrate lesson plans into existing curriculum or teach as a separate module. Videos showing lessons in action are available as well. You'll need to create a free account to download resources.

Draftback in the Chrome web store

Draftback lets you play back the revision history of any Google Doc you can edit. It's like going back in time to look over your own shoulder as you write.

We all know how to look at the editing history in a Google Doc, but Draftback is an extension you can add to the Chrome (or Opera) browser which takes all that editing history and puts it into a timeline interface so you can watch the document grow in super high-speed. You can adjust the speed, of course (10x, 20x, etc.). Super useful to allow students to demonstrate, for example, that they wrote a paper themselves and didn't copy in large chunks of text from any other source.

Note that individuals need editing rights to the documents to use this tool.

The link at the bottom of the screen (EVERYTHING ABOUT...research and writing) leads to the page on this very CCS Library website with a ton of guides for student writing. To help students find it more easily, it's also at the top of every CCS Library website page under the tab for "The Collection." 

Northwestern University's Knight Lab has a free suite of super cool tools for integrating data with storytelling in meaningful ways. What kind of data, you ask? 

• photographs
• video/VR
• audio + text
• data + graphs + commentary on said data
• maps
• timelines

It's hard to explain how solid the New York Times' educational resources are. So many different ways of interacting with current events, writing, the arts, you name it. Contests throughout the year. Teachers' guides. Both serious and more light-hearted activities. Another one of those sites where it's impossible to fully explain how useful it is—you have to go and poke around yourself, and remember to always check back to find what's new.

Plenty of solid classroom resources centered on journalism with an international focus. Lesson plans, contests, and professional development for teachers, including live webinars with Pulitzer-prize winning journalists. You can sign up for a weekly K-12 education newsletter (because you need a new weekly newsletter?).

The Economist has an excellent set of educational resources available for free (though you will need to create an account). Their resources are packaged as stand-alone PDFs that include materials for teachers as well as students, and quite often PDFs for slideshow display. They group their resources into projects (more substantial units coming out every two months that focus on bigger-issue topics) and headlines (updated weekly, based on more immediate news).

To give you an idea of what they offer, here's a sample download for the opening activity for the project on Cancel Culture. Note that this is one of seven resources supporting this unit. (Here's the link to the full set of downloads, if you're curious).

Examples of Projects:

Examples of Headlines:

Check these out! A great resource with an international perspective; our international students will appreciate the opportunity to build their skills through resources that look at the wider world.

You want to use podcasts in your classroom but you're not quite sure how? Awesome. Let the child lead. (This is one of the underlying philosophies in Montessori education.) OK, but seriously:

Don't worry if you're not familiar with the technical aspects of recording and editing audio. A), this changes all the time anyway, and B), the students either know how to do this part or can partner up with peers who can teach them. What you can do, though, is teach the interviewing, listening, editing, writing, and narrative skills. While a lot of this translates over from the world of good old fashioned writing, there are so many more resources available now devoted specifically to teaching podcast creation. Three great places to start are:

1. Teaching podcasting: an NPR curriculum guide for educators. Tons of links, recources, lesson plans, sample podcast episodes, etc. The whole kit and kaboodle, right here. Seriously: a) you should be using podcasting in your class, and b) this is how to get started. Update: the Youth Radio link at the bottom of this section, "How to Make a Podcast," is also an exceptional intro to podcast production, and is written more toward a student audience.

2. Transom.org: A showcase and workshop for new public radio. Another fantastic resource, but less focused on classroom instruction. Good starting places are their tabs for Techniques and Ideas. (They also have a great Tools tab if you want to get into the weeds with hardware and what-not, but for classroom-level work, the audio recording capabilities of everybody's smartphone is just fine.) Transom.org has great resources on the sorts of things you wouldn't think of, but that are key to creating podcasts of higher quality. It's a great place to send students who think they already know everything about podcasting. (As one example of something I learned on their site, when interviewing someone you shouldn't audibly comment as your subject speaks with the usual vocal assurances we offer like "umm-hmm" and "wow" and "yeah" and "OK,...". The reason is that this breaks the magic your podcast listener might otherwise hear as they imagine, in the cocoon of audio, that your interview subject is speaking directly to them. Hearing your constant little vocal assurances reminds your listeners that they are not listening to your subject directly, but merely listening in on someone else's conversation. Much less transporting!)

Finally, the CCS logo headphones above link to a page I put together a few years ago to share podcast recommendations with students. The homepage of the library website also includes an automatically-updated RSS feed (that's what RSS feeds do...) of specific episodes from several great podcasts. If you have podcast recommendations beyond these, please let your friendly CCS librarian know and I'll happily add them to the lists.

3. Youth Radio: YR Media is a national network of young journalists and artists. Their site is a great place to expose students to the power of student-created and -produced audio content; they feature stories created by young people focused on a range of issues. They also have a great DIY page with topics ranging from actual technical advice to broader things like "how to be an ethical journalist" and "how to find sources to interview." 

• Here's their overall DIY page, with plenty of useful options to check out... 

and here are two specifically very useful pages:

This last link is amazingly useful. EVERYTHING is here, including lists of high-interest quality podcasts to help students understand the potential of this medium.

Test link:

MURAL is a free, super powerful online collaboration tool with tons of potential. I wish I'd known about it during online-only pandemic instruction, but it offers a lot to the everyday classroom experience (and student group work) also. One excellent feature is "stealth mode," which the teacher can turn on to allow students to mark up the collaboration space individually, until it's turned off and all responses appear to the whole group.

The general website is www.mural.co, but the link above, and right here, is to a premade class lecture toolkit comprised of a mural space already populated with templates for collaboration space, PDF links, lecture materials, etc. The link to the class lecture toolkit includes a few videos showing how Murals work.

“The Declaration at 250” is a multi-year, broad-based initiative by the Gilder Lehrman Institute to recognize the importance of the Declaration of Independence in the history of America, and of the world. The initiative will produce resources and programs that explore themes such as the intellectual and cultural origins of the Declaration, its unprecedented nature among traditional forms of government, the Declaration and the genesis of the African American civil rights movement, the influence of the Declaration on the formation of other countries, and the impact of the Declaration on later generations of Americans, from the Civil War to the twenty-first century. (—from their website)

ALL SORTS of resources are included—primary source documents, historical images, short videos of historians discussing key issues, longer video lectures, portrayals of the founding era on stage, lesson plans, etc.

“Surely nobody,” you reasonably scoff, “could tire of Zoom’s online meeting functionality!” And of course you are right. But if you find yourself in some parallel universe and in need of an online platform for hosting virtual meetings, screenshares, slideshows, and chats, then check out Gather.town. Probably would be too noisy to have several online meetings broadcasting from the same classroom, but if groups of day and boarding students needed to meet outside of class, this does look like a lot of fun. Free for groups of fewer than 25.

Information on fair use

"Fair use is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances. Section 107 of the Copyright Act provides the statutory framework for determining whether something is a fair use and identifies certain types of uses—such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research—as examples of activities that may qualify as fair use."

Section 107 identifies four factors that help determine whether a use constitutes fair use.

Note that fair use can only be determined by a court of law; because the law requires the overall weighing of four factors, there is no specific criteria to clearly meet.

How can you use images in your courses while not violating copyright? How can students use images in their schoolwork? Don't fear! Copyright law grants a wide allowance for reuse of information and ideas—including visual information—for educational use. Below is a document published by the Visual Resources Association stating their guidance on the fair use of images in an educational context.

"The uninhibited flow of information and ideas – including visual information – is essential to advancing our collective state of knowledge in the arts and sciences. Nowhere is this more evident than in the academic context, where teachers, scholars and students, and those who support such individuals (such as visual resources staff and librarians), access and use information to engage in activities that are at the heart of our freedoms of expression: to comment and critique, evaluate, and compare; to create; to encourage the development of new ideas and thought; and to communicate those ideas and thoughts to others. The robust use of images is essential in this context: images uniquely convey information. They are often the only or best means by which certain ideas can be expressed." —from the VRA document linked below

STATEMENT ON THE FAIR USE OF IMAGES FOR TEACHING, RESEARCH, AND STUDY

Copyright Quick Guide

A detailed look at “fair use”

A very detailed and possibly useful flowchart for deciding whether the possible use of an image would likely be considered "fair use."

Checklist for conducting a fair use analysis

This can help you weigh the factors for and against a finding of fair use for the material you are considering using.

Supporting resources for “informed, open-minded discussions about the news”

This page has a number of excellent classroom guides to help support the skills necessary for responding thoughtfully to the news, including some simple lesson plans and handouts.

from The Economist: To have a high-quality conversation about current affairs, students need knowledge of the issue they're discussing as well as critical-thinking and communication skills: speaking, listening, problem-solving and creativity.

Topical Talk aims to do this in the following ways, and teachers can follow these principles in their classrooms too.

• Provide expert information: high-quality journalism, data and topic experts
• Encourage creativity and problem-solving: philosophical questions and hard choices call for good ideas and strong reasoning
• Encourage effective speaking and listening: teachers act as discussion-facilitators, not lecturers
• Expose young people to different perspectives: different arguments and voices presented

The Economist has an excellent set of educational resources available for free (though you will need to create an account). Their resources are packaged as stand-alone PDFs that include materials for teachers as well as students, and quite often PDFs for slideshow display. They group their resources into projects (more substantial units coming out every two months that focus on bigger-issue topics) and headlines (updated weekly, based on more immediate news).

To give you an idea of what they offer, here's a sample download for the opening activity for the project on Cancel Culture. Note that this is one of seven resources supporting this unit. (Here's the link to the full set of downloads, if you're curious).

Examples of Projects:

Examples of Headlines:

Check these out! A great resource with an international perspective; our international students will appreciate the opportunity to build their skills through resources that look at the wider world.