[TIPS] hotchalk - NBC video footage and more

I don't know if this has gone around or not, but I first learned about it from Stephanie M, from IU9. Hotchalk (http://www.hotchalk.com) is a lot of things. But, I think the part that will attract the most attention is the access to thousands of NBC news footage files dating back decades.

First, here's what the site says about itself:
"At HotChalk, our mission is to improve the lives of teachers. Our community software makes it possible for teachers to work together, making lesson planning, assignment distribution, collection and grading easier than ever before. HotChalk puts students in charge of their grades by giving them the information they need to manage their academic responsibilities. HotChalk makes communicating with parents easy, turning teachers, students, and parents into high-performance teams to produce measurable academic results.

The HotChalk Learning Environment is free for all schools everywhere and is based on an advertising-supported business model. With the patent-pending HotChalk Community Standards Engine, each school can control which ads students see, and determine which ads are shown. Please note that HotChalk never displays advertising during the school day to students. Also children under the age of 13 are never exposed to advertising."

You can create classes and add resources to the classes. That part, for me, is just fine. But click the NBC News tab at the top to search from among thousands of videos from NBC. You can add those to your resources, as well.

The site is more than I have time to talk about right now, but make sure you show this to your Social Studies teachers. Click here for a tutorial for using the videos from NBC: http://hotchalk.com/screencasts/nbc/