Classroom Resources: Spice Up Your Classroom by Writing Your Own News!

A good teacher often brings outside resources into his or her classroom - newspaper articles, book excerpts, images, etc. Yet sometimes you can't find a news article that's perfect for your lesson.

So what do you do? Make up your own!

It may seem a little sneaky, but it's an incredibly effective technique. You can make up your own news story, make it look entirely authentic, and stir up a great classroom discussion.

This guide will show you how to quickly and easily create a document that looks exactly like an article printed from the New York Times website. You'll need access to a few basic applications - MS Internet Explorer and MS Frontpage. Both of these come pre-installed on most new computers.

Getting Started - Creating Your Template

First you need to create a file formatted to look like a New York Times article. You can access all of the code that is used on the website and recreate it yourself, but this would take a long time and require a lot of experience with web design.

Instead, we can just begin with an existing article and edit it to our liking.

Open Internet Explorer and go to http://nytimes.com. Click on any headline to open an article.

On the right side of the article, you should see several options, including "Print" and "Share." Click on the "Print" option, and a new version of the article will load. This one is more printer friendly and easier to edit.

Next, save the webpage to your hard drive. Go to File -> Save As. In the "Save As Type" box, make sure "Webpage, complete (*.htm, *.html)" is selected. This should be selected by default. If you don't see a "File" option on the menu bar, press Alt-F and the menu should open.

Now we've got a canvas to work with.

Editing the Article

We now need to go into an html editor to make changes to the page. Open up Microsoft Frontpage.

Go to File -> Open and navigate to the directory that you saved the article to. If you don't see the article that you saved, make sure "Files of type" is set to "Web Pages."

Now, all we need to do is edit the article to contain the information that we want it to have. For each section that you want to replace, highlight the information on the page and type in the new information.

First, let's update the date. Highlight the date at the top of the page and type "September 20, 2007." You'll notice that the original formatting is unchanged.

Next, highlight the existing headline and type in your new headline.

As long as you don't completely delete a section of the article, you'll never lose its formatting. For this reason, it's important that you highlight a section that you want to replace, rather than simply hitting backspace repeatedly to delete it.

Finishing Touches

Once you've typed up your article, you're almost ready to go. However, you'll want to take some care to make sure that your article reads as an authentic New York Times article. Otherwise your student will notice it's a fake!

Proofread thoroughly. Typos are a dead give-away of a fake.

Use journalistic style and language. This means using mostly short sentences. Save your long winded speech for another time.

Use normal journalistic conventions. You should check how regular journalists use titles and abbreviations.

Reading through a regular article, you'll notice some of the words are underlined and blue. This is because they are hyperlinks. Clicking on them performs a search for other articles containing those words.

You should choose some terms in your article (the names of famous people or institutions work well) and turn them into links. Highlight the term you want to use and go to Insert -> Hyperlink. The destination of the link is not important, so click on any of the files that appear in the dialogue box. Click OK and your text will appear like all of the other links.

That should do it. Good luck, and enjoy your discussion!