Thoora is a wonderful website that offers the user the flexibility of unraveling current as well as older news items. The user is able to read the latest news on any given topic. There are main categories, which may be chosen from such as “Top Stories, Business, Controversy, Entertainment, Lifestyle, Politics, Sci/Tech, Sports”. These may be chosen from the startup screen. Once the search has been started, one may navigate through the multiple blogs on the topic. The site gives the user the information regarding how many different stories there are which refer to that specific topic, how many blogs there are on that topic, how many tweets/hour have been posted on that subject as well as any further comments that have been posted regarding the subject. I found the site extremely easy to navigate and use and I can definitely see how this site could be extremely useful in the classroom for many multiple tasks. It may be utilized cross-curriculum and assist the student in any research topic. In my classroom, for example, I assigned my students an extra credit assignment involving the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I offered and encouraged my students to utilize this website as a spring board for further in depth research on public sentiment regarding the fall of the wall and what it meant twenty years ago and what it means to society today. The students who utilized this site found the articles and blogs easy to understand and offered them a great perspective about the history of the wall itself and what it meant to the German people both then and now. The students reported that they were easily guided through the website and this enabled them to quickly accomplish the given task as well as learn something new along the way.
Hi Marianne,
ReplyDeleteI think after perusing Thoora's site, that if I was a blogger that blogged about the news, I would use this site. As a journalism teacher, I don't think the "buzz" or people's blogs should drive what I look for in news content. I think it definitely serves a need for those who need to keep a finger on what is the most hot, most talked about issue at any moment. But in my journalism class, I won't use it for the news, I would use it to explain how information is viewed.
Sheryl /floyd
I was curious after reading about this, and then seeing the comment left by the previous person, so I went to the website myself. I searched for the Berlin Wall since we had been talking about that in class recently as well. The majority of the hits I got back were indeed blogs. I think 3 were actually news sites. I guess it would depend on what you were actually looking for in your assignment. If you wanted your students to have an appreciation for how people felt about the Berlin Wall and how it impacted people's lives, then perhaps the blogs would be a very important aspect of the information they would need. But I would not use Thoora exclusively, simply because it is lacking in factual links. But it does provide great emotional, and possibly thoughtful links. Other than that, it is categorized quite well as Marianne says, and it's very easily navigated. It might be a great site to use if you were looking for new blogs to read also.
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