The Gun and Fodey

"The Gun" is the story of Esi, a black boy who lives with his family on a white (Afrikaaner) owned farm near the homeland of Mapoteng. Esi's father and mother oversee the farm for "Boss" Mackay, the director of a mining company in Johannesburg. As Esi grows up, he witnesses police raids and becomes frustrated with both the apartheid system and his father's role in preserving the status quo. While out in the bush hunting with Mackay's future son-in-law, Williams, Esi makes a choice that will change his life forever.

For this story, I chose to focus on the reading comprehension strategy of summarizing. Students often have difficulty with this skill and want to include every single detail from a story or passage in their summary, rather than focusing on the main points. Teachers need to explicitly teach and model the skill, and provide many opportunities for guided and independent practice. One excellent activity for developing the ability to summarize is writing newspaper articles.

I chose to use a newspaper clip generator from the web site Fodey. The tool is very simple to use - enter the name of the newspaper, title, date, and article, and click generate. The resulting picture can be downloaded, saved on a computer, and embedded in a web site or blog, like this:

As with any tool, I see both pros and cons to using Fodey with students. On a positive note, the tool is quite simple and easy to use. I wouldn't anticipate upper elementary or middle school students having any trouble with it. It also generates a very realistic looking newspaper clip, which can be motivating for students. It also generates the clip as a picture (jpg file) which is a standard file format that works with blogs, web sites, and even word processing or presentation software.

However, there are cons to the tool as well. One of them is that Fodey does not provide an option of storing the work in an online gallery, which means that teachers who wish to share or showcase student work on the web must have another site on which to do so. The generator also cut my text slightly when I first generated the clip, so I went back and shortened my article. This would mean that students would be limited to short compositions - and potential limit the use for short stories or articles as opposed to novels. Even with these limitations, however, I still see value in using a tool like Fodey with students as they learn to summarize text.