Our Philosophy

As a middle school teacher in Nebraska, I was interested in a current events quiz game activity that would get my students excited and motivated to follow the news on their own. To do this, I recognized that my first goal was to battle classroom apathy that goes along with being a pre-teen and teen. I tried several different quiz products on the market. I had trouble with these products because I was always rewriting the questions. After time had passed, I realized that what I was fixing was the content that was intended to "stump" my students. I quickly found out that a "stumped" student led to loss of interest, boredom and eventual discipline problems.

The lesson I learned was if I was going to do this, I needed to develop a quiz game that was productive, not counter-productive. The NewzBrain Education lifelong learning quiz program has successfully proven to motivate interest in the news and battle students apathy at all levels.

NewzBrain has seven elements that make it effective in K-12 schools:

1. NewzBrain teaches and interests students in today's events through a multi-disciplinary method that includes advanced technology, reading, writing, geography, history, current events and higher level thinking and writing. NewzBrain includes Interactive Classroom Games written in two levels (Grades 3-5 and Grades 6-12) and the Student Assessment and Writing Portal. This approach emphasizes weekly team classroom cooperative learning and weekly individual assessments and writing. The teacher has the option to use the NewzBrain site as a total curriculum portal assessing individual student knowledge of the news from the past week. The Student Portal provides an individual weekly 20-question assessment and also engages students in individual writings or blogs that demonstrate a literate, analytical approach to non-fictional material.
   
   
2. For quiz questions, NewzBrain allows students an educated guess, even if they have no idea what the answer is.
   
   
3. NewzBrain uses humor in the quiz game because students love class time where they are allowed to be expressive and free to smile.
   
   
4. NewzBrain game rules allow for teacher discretion. The games can be played in various forms, such as the popular Las Vegas NewzBrain, the Pigskin NewzBrain, Jeopardy style and other games.
   
   
5. Teachers may implement NewzBrain strictly as a homework site, enrichment site, writing site, or an assessment site. Any activity can be a 5-15 minute sponge activity played daily or throughout the day or a full weekly 30-45 minute enrichment activity. The greatest strength of NewzBrain for the educator is "ABSOLUTELY NO TEACHER PREPARATION."
   
   
6. NewzBrain stresses class interaction between the teacher and the students. NewzBrain is an activity where learning should take place together. In other words, the teachers are never the experts. When learning takes place on an equal plane, the opportunity exists for a real trust to develop between the students and the teacher.
   
   
7. NewzBrain includes a Quiz Bowl Challenge and the Monthly Team Challenge. The challenge is student driven integrating language arts and social studies study skills. The raw scores are used as a benchmark grade and the results are entered into a state and national contest. The goals are to better scores each week or each month, pay more attention to the news events of the day, and be involved in an intense competition against students from all states.
   
   

I sincerely hope you join our family of NewzBrain schools across America! NewzBrain is Current Affairs, Technology and Literacy all in one curriculum site!