Friday, October 15, 2010

Provide Students with a Personalized Newspaper Everyday for Free!

You can provide your students with a personalized daily newspaper tailored to your student's, classes' or school's passions and interests with a free service called Paper.li.

Paper.li will make a daily newspaper following the Tweets of those a Twitter user follows, a Twitter hash tag or a list. The newspaper is delivered in a very reader-friendly format using the Twitter updates and links to bring readers stories, tweets, videos, photos and more. It is simple to create and the end result appears in under a minute and is beautiful. Here is a thumbnail of mine. Click the paper to see the actual paper.


Innovative educators can use Paper.li in a number of ways.


For schools or classes
If you haven't already, set up a twitter tag for your school or class and ensure your students and teachers know to use that tag in their tweets. Recognize that tweets with links to articles, videos, and images, make the best content for Paper.li. A school could have administrators and teachers tweet using a particular hashtag resulting in a daily Paper.li newspaper that can be embedded on the school website. A teacher could do the same using a class hash tag. A teacher might want to invite parents and students into the equation sharing the hash tag with them. End result, a unique class newspaper that the whole community contributes to!

For students
First help students begin building their personal learning network on Twitter by following those who share their interests. Of course one way they can do this is by following their friends. Another way is for the student and their friends to come up with their own hash tag. To make global connections about topics of interest you can teach students to do a twitter search on a topic of interest and follow the people who are writing things you like on that topic. Once students have selected people to follow, Paper.li will do the rest. Talk about a new way for students to report on current events from a paper that is made just for them by their friends and the people whose interests they share. This is a transformational way to ingest and share personalized and newsworthy content.

Another option for using Paper.li with students is to create newspapers aligned to units of study. In literature you may create a paper that follows a particular author. In social studies you may follow a historical figure or historical event to see what people are saying about it today. Remember students and you can use that term in your tweets as well to contribute to the Paper.li newspaper. You could do the same thing for really any subject. Imagination is your only limit.

Get started with Paper.li
If you’re ready to get started with Paper.li here are five simple steps to get started.
1. Visit http://paper.li/
2. Select “Create a Paper”
3. You will be prompted to sign in. Sign in using Twitter.
4. Select “Create a newspaper”
5. Indicate either the list, tag, or twitter account from which you want the paper created

1 comment:

  1. Very cool! Do you know of an elementary class using this sort of thing? I'd worry about making sure the content is appropriate for classrooms. But I love the idea!

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