Current events?

I am not a great fan of current events in the classroom.

Why? Because what we generally see as a current events programme is: a teacher decides what of value has happened in the past week maybe 2. (generally looking in newspapers and on TV).
The questions that are generated at an assessment level are trivial pursuit in nature. So why do we teach this?

• The deep learning ?
• Is it Thinking or Remembering?

So people fit in with the conversations in the street the chit chat etc. or perhaps so that we have a wider understanding of the world around us?
That I feel this is selling ourselves short.
Short on where we need to be for the future we need to be articulate about.
I feel we need to lift our overall level of understanding of politics, social issues, environmental issues tetc
Instead

• Teach students reciprocal teaching
• Work in wikis or online collaborations reflecting on current issue events
• compare 2
• Order five current events in order of importance state why?
• Debate a case.
• Use graphic organisers
• Read each others blogs on current events
• RSS Feed from news sites and even add specific google news search to follow a topic
• Fight the desire to summatively assess recall
• Nonlinguistic representation
  

I looked at some of Stuff from a wiki Marzano and web2.0
worth a browse.