I’ve thought for awhile that it would be nice for students to be able to create their own online daily newspaper highlighting what they are interested in — that kind of interest is at the heart of Krashen’s free voluntary reading concept.
There are personal home pages (see The Best Personal Home Page Creators) that sort of allow that kind of activity, but they don’t recreate the feel and look of a newspaper, and are not necessarily what I’m looking for. I’d love to find something that makes it extremely easy for students to identify topics of interest and, while it doesn’t necessarily have to look like a newspaper, at least has a non-cluttered and simple lay-out.
Sites like Daily Me and Meehive allow for great customization, but don’t provide a clean enough lay-out, I think, to make it particularly accessible to English Language Learners.
Simply Headlines has a great lay-out, but doesn’t have a particularly wide range of customization features. Plus, it will only email it to you, so you can’t read it outside of your email.
Any other suggestions out there?
Hello Larry
I’ve used a site called newspaper generator in my blog before.
http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp
Here is an expample of how i’ve used it.
http://visitmyclass.com/blogs/theskinny/archive/2008/04/16/141335.aspx
So far I’ve used it to write funny headlines and articles in my blog but I am planning to use it with kids in a number of different ways.
Its easy to use and the kids seem to like it a lot.
I have been working with my mixed ability 8th grade technology class (in Rancho Cordova) on creating a student-run newspaper. This has proved a bit more difficult than I anticpated as my students do whatever they can to stay away from the writing process. That being said, I tried to end-run them by having them creating their own wiki page. I am hopeful that they can pull some of what they put on their wiki page and transfer that onto their own edublog site. Nothing there to share yet — when there is all let you know.
I came across this site http://www.crayon.net/ while searching around for writing activities not long after reading your post. It seems to be a way of creating a newspaper based on links to sources of info you choose, and those in the US can input zip codes to get local news and wasther. I haven’t used it yet and it doesn’t really show what the content looks like or how complex it is, but looks interesting.