I’ve spent years trying to find a good application that would let students create their own individual online “newspapers” with personalized content.
Finally, over the past two months, four excellent ones have opened for business.
I found another excellent one today, which is why I’m writing this post.
In order to make it on this list, the application must be free; make the content available in an attractive and accessible way for English Language Learners; and make it very easy to sign-up and add new preferences.
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.
Here are my choices for The Best Sites For Creating Personalized “Newspapers” Online:
iCurrent is the site I just discovered today, and it looks great. It’s super simple to add personalized news “channels” and the content is very accessible. It has one problem, though — you can’t make your “newspapers” public. So, even though you can share individual channels (it uses thousands of sources) and individual articles, you can’t post the url of your newspaper so others can read it, too. If and when they add this ability, iCurrent will become a favorite of teachers like me (and students like mine).
Newscred looks like another great way students (and anyone else) can create their own personalized online newspaper. You can learn about them in the TechCrunch blog and Demo Girl has created a screencast on how to use it. Newscred does allow you to post the url address of your newspaper, and my students have done so on our class blogs.
1 Cast is sort of a “one-stop shop” for online video news. You can create your own individual video channels based on your preferences by clicking on the “Watch More Video News” on the top right of the home page’s screen.
Fwix pulls together local news stories from local news outlets in hundreds of cities throughout the world. You click on one city, and you get tons of media from the local papers, television, and other sources. It’s obviously a good place for learning about a place. For me, though, it’s particularly appealing for the ability to comment on the stories. Until it gets more popular, it will probably be free of the invective that you usually find in the comments section at the websites of the local news outlets themselves.
Feedback and suggestions are welcome!
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