When teaching students about current events I have always tried to incorporate maps so that students can make a connection to the places that they are reading about. I do this if the story is about something happening in Africa or something happening twenty miles down the road from our community. Newspaper Map and the Breaking News map are both helpful in showing students the connections between story subjects and their corresponding locations.

Newspaper Map is a neat tool for locating and reading newspapers from locations all around the world. Newspaper Map claims to have geolocated 10,000 newspapers. To find a newspaper you can browse the map then click on a placemark to open the link within to read a newspaper. You can also locate newspapers by using the search boxes to locate a newspaper by title or location. Along with links to the newspapers, Newspapers Map provides links to translate the newspapers you find on the map.

Breaking News presents a constant stream of headlines from around the world. A map of story locations resides behind the news stream that greets you on the homepage. Click the tiny map icon in the upper-right corner of the news stream to find stories by location instead of by topic.

Applications for Education
A common assignment in social studies courses is to have students find, review, and share current events stories. If your students are studying a particular region of the world, Newspaper Map and Breaking News map could help them find stories related to that region.