Newscred looks like a great way students (and anyone else) can create their own personalized online newspaper. Of course, it’ll even be greater when their site is consistently up. They were written up in the TechCrunch blog today, and I suspect they’re being overwhelmed with traffic.
I’ve been looking for a good site performing this kind of service for awhile, and have written about my frustrations. I was finally able to get through to Newscred and was impressed. Once they work out their technical issues, it should be an ideal place for students to identify topics that they’re interested in and have an attractively designed and accessible source to read about it.
The site has 2500 news feeds. It’s simple as pie to set-up your paper, and you can create multiple papers on different topics.
Obviously, a fair amount of the information that shows-up in these feeds is going to be quite challenging for English Language Learners to understand. However, since it’s on the topics they choose, and shown in an attractive form, it will certainly provide high-interest reading material that one can hope they’d want to ‘fight-through” a bit to comprehend.
I’m tentatively adding Newscred to The Best News/Current Events Websites For English Language Learners — 2009 — assuming they fix their technical issues.
Larry:
Great post. I haven’t had a problem with NewsCred so I’m guessing it’s because of the new traffic to the site. I’ve been using NewsCred and MeeHive for a bit now. I like both of them for a variety of reasons, though I’m a little leery of the sharing capability on MeeHive. My comparison is at http://eztechintegration.blogspot.com/2009/12/news-personalized.html
Hi Larry – thanks for the great writeup and also adding us to your “Best of 2009” list! We do apologize for some of the issues you had last weekend. Our servers got slammed by the launch traffic, and we’ve worked really hard to bring everything back to normal. Should be 100% now…
We’ve had a number of teachers and people involved with ESL education make similar comments as you. We’re thrilled that NewsCred might be a resource that helps people learn – please do let us know what we can do better.
Thanks,
Shafqat (cofounder)