Lit and Tech

  I'm old enough to remember clipping an article out of a newspaper, writing a summary of it, presenting it to my middle school classmates, and adding it to the collection on the wall. (So yeah, me, ancient.) We had to do this once a month and it was always a completely different story.  As a teacher, I wondered what would happen if students followed the SAME topic in the news all year long. I created an assignment/project I called Follow That News.   You can have a copy of it here , click the link and then "use template." It's not fancy, just a lot of written directions about the project, the different assignment descriptions and some rough idea of the due dates.  Here is the gist of it: In the fall, students choose a topic in the news that is of interest to them. Of course, they have to write what they already know about it, and why they want to follow that story. Then, in October, January, and April, students write an update about what is happening in that news sto