Summarizing and Reporting & Report Writing Kevin Cummins 2010 Digital Literacies Summarizing and Reporting & Report Writing Kevin Cummins 2010 www.edgalaxy.com

Summarizing and Reporting Summarising Text is an important skill for pulling out important facts, (who, what, when where and why?)or whatever key information you are trying to attain from a piece of writing so that you can retell it in your own words. Today we are going to look at three methods to summarize text and present it using technology. Highlighting Text Creating a Table Creating a Diagram or Flow Chart www.edgalaxy.com

Sinking of The Titanic (Your Text) The text you will use is from Eyewitness History It retells The Sinking of the Titanic. The Text is located on the next slide for those who do not have Internet Access www.edgalaxy.com

On April 10, 1912, the Titanic, largest ship afloat, left Southampton, England on her maiden voyage to New York City. The White Star Line had spared no expense in assuring her luxury. A legend even before she sailed, her passengers were a mixture of the world's wealthiest basking in the elegance of first class accommodations and immigrants packed into steerage. She was touted as the safest ship ever built, so safe that she carried only 20 lifeboats - enough to provide accommodation for only half her 2,200 passengers and crew. This discrepancy rested on the belief that since the ship's construction made her "unsinkable," her lifeboats were necessary only to rescue survivors of other sinking ships. Additionally, lifeboats took up valuable deck space. Four days into her journey, at 11:40 P.M. on the night of April 14, she struck an iceberg. Her fireman compared the sound of the impact to "the tearing of calico, nothing more." However, the collision was fatal and the icy water soon poured through the ship. It became obvious that many would not find safety in a lifeboat. Each passenger was issued a life jacket but life expectancy would be short when exposed to water four degrees below freezing. As the forward portion of the ship sank deeper, passengers scrambled to the stern. John Thayer witnessed the sinking from a lifeboat. "We could see groups of the almost fifteen hundred people still aboard, clinging in clusters or bunches, like swarming bees; only to fall in masses, pairs or singly, as the great after part of the ship, two hundred and fifty feet of it, rose into the sky, till it reached a sixty-five or seventy degree angle." The great ship slowly slid beneath the waters two hours and forty minutes after the collision The next morning, the liner Carpathia rescued 705 survivors. One thousand five hundred twenty-two passengers and crew were lost. Subsequent inquiries attributed the high loss of life to an insufficient number of lifeboats and inadequate training in their use. www.edgalaxy.com

Highlighting Text You will need to copy the previous text from This PowerPoint (CTRL + C) into Word and then you are going to highlight the text using these Icons. You can select a range of colours to highlight different types of text. www.edgalaxy.com

Highlighting Text Please Highlight all of the Text in Word using a different colour for each of the five W’s Who,? What? When? Where? Why? www.edgalaxy.com

Creating a Table Now that you have summarized your text into the 5 W’s based around the sinking of the Titanic. You will create a table of all your information. It should look something Like this. Your Table may be more detailed than mine Here is a simple explanation about creating tables in MS Word if you are unsure of how to do this. WHO? WHAT? WHEN? WHERE? Southampton England Atlantic Ocean WHY? www.edgalaxy.com

Creating a Flowchart Now that we have collected all of our data and organised it into a table next we are going to create a flowchart of the events that happened that led to the sinking of the Titanic. You can do this in Word 2007 or PowerPoint 2007 using the SmartArt tool and selecting the Process option. Here is a link to video explaining how to do this. www.edgalaxy.com

Writing Your Report Now that you have collected all of your information from the Titanic text, created your table and a flowchart your final task is to retell the sinking of the Titanic in your own words. The purpose of your report is to Provide Information State the Facts Your Teacher will advise you on the amount of writing you are expected to do. Please visit www.writingfun.com for greater detail on writing an information report. www.edgalaxy.com

Further Information For further information on Information Report Writing Please visit www.writingfun.com For Further information on Summarising Text please click here. For Hundreds of Literacy Activities, Lesson Plans and Resources please visit www.edgalaxy.com www.edgalaxy.com