News Roundup

"The Student News Action Network is just the type of initiative to which schools of the future will gravitate. It represents the best of current strategies to engage students in their schooling (project-based learning that addresses real-world, global problems and events), and at the same time demands the most polished and sophisticated 'demonstrations of learning' via 'publish-worthy' work from student reporters covering the world's news."

- Patrick Bassett, President of the National Association of Independent Schools

"News Action is one of the most exciting new ventures I've seen in a long while. It will help students sharpen some of the 21st century's most important skills -- communication, collaboration, and conceptual thinking. But equally important, it offers young people a meaningful way to engage with the world, direct their own work, and shape the public conversation. This one-of-a-kind program has the potential to remake journalism and reinvigorate education."

- Daniel H. Pink, author of A Whole New Mind and Drive

"I am a huge supporter of this approach. It offers a remarkable opportunity to help young people make sense of the world in an era of information overload. A global audience offers students an extra incentive to discern what is important from what is not, and then to deliver clear, confident, sound judgments, tools that will serve them in whatever career they choose."

- Doug Jehl, Foreign Editor, The Washington Post

"The world's 200 nation-states and their politicians are making a hash of global issues management, and humanity must urgently invent and launch new methods of global problem-solving before it is too late. But for those to work, we need a second thing: armies of students emerging across the world from their years of education with a much more developed sense of being foremost global citizens and a far better command of global issues and their solutions than their parents ever possessed. And I can think of no more worthwhile contribution to that second requisite than an idea like NewsAction -- the joint WIS/TIG global student-led news agency initiative. Beyond the powerful learning experiences that this astute initiative holds in store, there is something especially compelling in having students the world over report 24/7 to their peers on the very global issues which previous generations seem to be leaving for them to solve."

- Jean-Francois Rischard, author of High Noon: Twenty Global Problems, Twenty Years to Solve Them

"At a time when major new broadcasters and newspapers are closing bureaus around the world, it seems ever more critical that we access as much information as we can about what's going on in different countries...I think Student News Action is a fantastic tool for equipping our children to give them a skill to become news literate in this very fast changing world."

- Katty Kay, Washington correspondent, BBC World News America

"New media in the form of blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and a plethora of other online forums, has dramatically changed how news and issues are accessed and analyzed. What NewsAction gives students is an opportunity to examine critically current issues and to communicate with their international student peers. By providing a forum for both reporting and learning, NewsAction allows students to apply what they learn in school to authentic, contemporary situations. It elevates the opinions of international students, putting them at the forefront of addressing and understanding the most important global issues. Services like NewsAction are crucial for helping shape the opinions of the next-generation of global leadership."

- Jean Vahey, Executive Director/CEO of the European Council of International Schools