A million minutes of genuine news hits YouTube

Remember the days when TV networks only scheduled an hour of news per day? and a live cross to a breaking story was for a legitimate event worth sticking with...

Well Associated Press does, and fortunately they have made their entire back catalogue of historic news events available to the world through YouTube.

Yes you can relive all one million minutes of the worlds most famous moments, both deadly serious and lighthearted.

The videos date back as far as 1895 and equate to 550, 000 individual uploads to YouTube.  The largest to date.

They are available here and could be applied to the classroom in a multitude of ways...  One thing is for sure though that those boring history lessons are about to get a little more visual.

You can access it here.

Over 85,000 amazing news reel videos for teachers and students

Spanning the period of 1896 through 1976 British Pathe was one of the worlds premier sources of quality video journalism for the English speaking world.  

During this time it amassed over 85,000 news reel clips covering some of the greatest achievements, tragedies and bizarre events of the twentieth century.  

These news reels are an excellent snapshot of the past and are dynamic teaching resources that could be applied to a range of curriculum areas including history, literacy and science.

Last week all of these clips became freely available as high definition clips on YouTube for future generations to call upon.  They can be found here.

I hope you find these resources useful and if you have used them with your own students feel free to leave a comment below.

Lesson Plan: Making cultural connections through writing tasks

After students have been exposed to informational writing, this cultural connections” activity provides an authentic way for students to use their interview skills to compose relevant questions and complete an interview with a guest that has travelled to another country.

Students will interview the guest, write an informational piece that discusses their findings, and then write an appropriate thank you letter to the person they interviewed.  This activity is real-world and is cross-curricular, since it embodies social studies/history and writing content

Click here to download the free lesson plan