Article Summaries
The SMMRY bookmark will generate a brief summary of any online article with the click of a button. The steps are simple:
Drag the SMMRY bookmark link up to your bookmark bar (link to the right).
Find an online article to summarize.
Click on the “One-click Summary” link in the bookmark bar
Enjoy reading your shortened article summary - the default length is 7 sentences.
Decrease the number of sentences in the summary by deleting the "7" in the box at the top of the page, replace with a smaller number, press Enter.
The sample summary to the right is for the Coast Redwoods v. Climate Change article on the National Park Service website.
ISTE Standards for Students 1.1.b.: Students build networks and customize their learning environments in ways that support the learning process.
Summary Writing Activity
Teachers enrolled in USC's Teaching Writing: Research to Practice course will recognize the template to the right. As explained in the book Best Practices in Writing Instruction, researchers Renee Weisberg and Ernest Balajthy developed a few macro rules for summary writing:
Delete material that is unimportant
Delete material that is redundant
Collapse lists - substitute a superordinate term for subordinate ones
Select a topic sentence (OR)
If there is no topic sentence, invent one
A sample of the process using the same Coast Redwoods v. Climate Change article as above is on the Doc's second page & can be deleted when sharing the template with students.
🔺 Summarization Pyramid
All kinds of resource sharing takes place in the Facebook EduProtocols Community group page. A version of the Summarization Pyramid template to the left was recently shared by the group admin, and EduProtocol author, Kim Voge. Before students write their final summaries in the pyramid base text box, they must first collect details to fill in the main pyramid's text blocks. Students start by adding a one-to-two word explanation of the passage's main idea. Next come two adjectives describing the main idea, followed by three nouns related to the big idea. The pyramid's fourth row is for “-ing” verbs associated with the big idea. In the fifth row, students write a 5 word title for a hypothetical book about the big idea. Students ask a 6-word question related to the text in the bottom row. Finally, in the base of the pyramid, students write their summary using words included in their pyramid. Allow students to share their pyramid, and their thinking used to create it, with the whole class.