You may be familiar with classroom news podcasts like CNN’s Student News, but what you might not realize is that the Archdiocese of Boston produces a similar show each week for Catholics called Newsbreak. Each episode is around five minutes long, a perfect length for showing to students in grades 6-12. New episodes air twice weekly, on Tuesdays and Fridays, providing Catholic teachers with an excellent way to help their students keep on top of what’s happening in the Church.
As the CatholicTV website explains,
Newsbreak is hosted by Kevin Nelson who researches and reports on Catholic news from all over the nation and the world. Videos are posted at CatholicTV.com each week and include video footage from Rome Reports, a news agency which specializes in coverage of the Pope and the Vatican.
News segments at CatholicTV.com focus on anything from violence in the Middle East, to charitable work, or even abortion. In its news pieces, CatholicTV also keeps viewers up to date on various calls to action from Catholic Bishops and the Pope through its privileged relationship with Centro Vaticano Television (CTV). CatholicTV receives video footage of Vatican and Papal events for Catholic Newsbreak from CTV.
Teachers can accesss Newsbreak in several ways:
- The show can be watched in your web browser by visiting CatholicTV.com
- Newsbreak is also available via video podcast through iTunes.
- There’s even a CatholicTV iPhone app that brings the latest episodes right to your phone, iPod Touch or iPad.
- Or, you can let Catholic School Chronicle make life easy for you. Just click on the “Launch the Player” button on the right sidebar of this page to bring up the CatholicTV video player, which gives you instant access to all of CatholicTV’s programming, including Newsbreak.
It’s extremely important that we Catholic educators keep up with current Catholic news. Ours is a living faith, not an ancient relic, and it is our responsibility to know what’s happening in Catholicism so we can share it with our students.
I like to make Friday’s Religion class come alive via multimedia, so I play the latest Newsbreak video, along with Lifeteen’s Sunday Sunday Sunday and Catholic Movie Review podcasts. Then we discuss some aspect of one or the other of the shows and connect it to whatever we’ve been studying in class that week.
I’d love to hear how you could use Newsbreak in your classroom. Why don’t you leave a comment below to share your ideas with other readers?