The news broke earlier today that the President of Honduras, Jose Manuel Zelaya, had been removed from power by military force. The first thing I did upon reading this was jump on Scoopler to search for real-time links and comments on the story. Scoopler allows you to find the most recent Twitter comments and links about a breaking story. I just got back to my room here at NECC and the real-time search results just keep pouring into Scoopler at rate of about one item every 3-5 seconds.

Applications for Education
Real-time search engines like Scoopler and One Riot are great resources to have when a story is breaking. These resources could be put to use by students in a current events course or in a journalism course. When I taught a current events course one of my favorite things to do was to have students analyze the reporting of one story from multiple sources. Real-time search brings in not only the stories from the major news outlets, but also brings in the “person on the street” perspective from social networks like Twitter and FriendFeed.

If you’d like some resources for learning about what’s going on in Honduras here are a couple of links:
CNN News Video
BBC News Video

For general information about Honduras (and all countries) the CIA World Factbook is always a good place to start.