NPR News
Top-notch digital content takes students beyond the airwaves
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NPR News
Pros: Quality selection of offline listening choices and straightforward browsing options make reading effortless.
Cons: Saving audio for offline listening can quickly consume hard-drive space.
Bottom Line: Provides an easy, fun, and effective way to engage students with radio.
Teachers could encourage students to use the app to dive more deeply into a particular story or topic, as well as invite them to share and comment on articles they've read. Teachers might also use the app to help students develop daily news-reading habits, and to encourage weaker readers to listen to audio content as they read the text.
NPR News is a gateway to new and archived content from National Public Radio. This app offers the best of both worlds: It’s a great app for reading the news and a great way to listen to the radio. The app’s main screen offers audio controls and one-touch access to listen live, and the top sections of the screen feature thumbnails of stories on various topics. Users can explore audio, text, and images from NPR's news, music, and arts & life sections, and also browse stories by audio program. An option is provided to hear NPR’s top-of-the-hour news update on demand, and kids can easily create a playlist of articles and topics to download for offline reading and listening. They can also search for local stations and save them to a favorites list for easy streaming.
The best thing about this app is how easy it is to navigate. Users swipe to bring up new articles, while links to listen or comment scroll down the page with the text. Since audio content can quickly monopolize space on a device, the app helpfully lets users limit which articles and topics will be saved for offline use.
Although this app wasn’t designed for education, it’s a useful tool for giving students broader access to NPR content. Just as some radio listeners are surprised to see the faces behind the announcers' voices, kids are excited to discover rich images and links that enhance the radio stories. Each article is an invitation to explore content in multiple ways, as a reader, a listener, a viewer, or all three. Since all content is free and can be viewed offline, this could be a great tool for the classroom, particularly for kids with limited Internet access at home.
Learning Rating
Community Rating
Good place to start when researching an issue
There is plenty of in-depth reporting as well if that is what you are looking for. Either way it is a good first place to start when discussing an issue
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