Activity 11: Summarizing RSS news items

Aim: Help students improve each other's writing

Moodle modules: RSS block and forum

Extra programs: None

Ease of setup: **

Summarizing text can be a good way to practice reading and writing. It focuses students on key bits of information and encourages them to organize and express that information in concise ways.

The idea behind this activity is that students select a story from the Internet. They then write a summary of it in a forum. To make it more interesting, you could get students to include why they chose that particular item. That might provoke comment and discussion from other forum members.

To make it easier for students to select a story, we will provide news feeds to stories. News feeds contain just the headlines and first few words of the news stories. They make it easy for students to skim over several stories. Here's an example of a news feed for IMDb news:

News feeds are also called RSS feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It...