NBC Learn

Editor's Note: NBC Learn now hosts all of their videos on a YouTube channel and doesn't maintain the website addressed in this review.

NBC Learn is a video-based educational news website for kindergarten through higher education. The website is free with a paid subscription option that includes many more videos as well as teacher support materials. The video library is vast, with current events videos as well as an archive of historical footage and news reports, original Learn Collections, and content from well-known shows such as NBC News and Meet the Press. It also includes media from NBC Sports, MSNBC, NBC Latino, and Spanish broadcasts from Telemundo. Archival photos from the Library of Congress, National Archives, and AP Images supplement the video media. The site is organized by topics that teachers and students can browse, or they can use the keyword search to find specific videos. There's also a section that recommends videos based on teacher profile.

Each video is linked to relevant state and national standards and offers closed captioning as well as transcripts. Teachers can use the playlist feature for lessons and units, but the feature does not support rearranging the video clips after adding them to the list, which makes it a bit clunky. Some videos also featured recommended activities. These, however, are just text in the Related Text field and aren't well-integrated with the videos. A new feature that takes the site up another notch, however, is the partnership with Newsela. Links to relevant articles on Newsela are now included with many of the videos, so teachers can use text sources with the multimedia to dive deeper into instructional content.  NBC Learn also has Google Classroom integration, so teachers can create an assignment linked to a video or playlist that already has the Newsela links embedded for easier lesson planning.

This is a highly useful site. NBC Learn stands out from the pack of other student-focused news sites by providing a large archive of current and historical news broadcasts to support classroom instruction. The Learn Collection videos have high-quality content and production values (although these videos are definitely more like traditional news than the YouTube-style explainers students may gravitate toward). Still, these videos offer students opportunities to develop their media literacy skills: analyzing and evaluating the information presented, and then doing further research or participating in discussion and debates. Students might also be inspired to do their own news reporting and informational video production. By design, the videos are accessible for learners who have reading challenges or vision disabilities, and closed captioning and transcripts support English language learners as well as students with hearing disabilities.

There's some room to grow, however. Not all videos have the same resources; some will feature Newsela articles and/or activities and some will not. Additionally, the activities included with some of the videos aren't integrated within the videos themselves, or interactive. There's also no way to assign videos or track progress. And yet, even without these features, NBC Learn offers a lot of utility for teachers who want to bring credible information into the classroom to fuel student inquiry.