Free+Summarizer

Free Summarizer is a tool where you can enter text to create a quick summary. As a sample, I entered the text from "My First Student" by Kanan Mishra with an introduction by Punya Mishra. This is a text that we were all assigned to read this week. I hit the "Summarize Now!" This is what it came up with:

//Apu lives all alone with his mother, his father having died towards the beginning of the movie. And this scene I am talking about is about Apu sharing the ideas and things he has learned in school with his mother. There is the lantern standing in for the sun and the little ball that is the planet and there is Apu showing his mother how night and day happen. It was evening and my father was sitting on a cot in front of our house when he asked me to bring my harmonium and sing a song. Nirmalya asked me after sometime. "In geography, we learn about the earth, the earth that you and I live in", I explained. I was sure in my knowledge that the earth moved around its own axis but I didn't know how to explain it to him. "Well, you must have driven a bullock cart' I asked Nirmalya and he nodded. He would sit hunchbacked on the ground clutching both his knees tightly with his crossed arms and would ask me questions about my studies and within a week I told him all that I had learnt in the school. The earth goes round its axis once in twentyfour hours, I told him and he asked me the same question that Nirmalya had asked me once so long ago. //

Does this make sense to you? I also summarized "Teaching That Sticks" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath to see if the result would be similar. This is what the site came up with:

//Because the concept is anchored in something students already know the solar system they can Every so often in his classes, Mazur will pose a conceptual question and then ask students to vote publicly on the class, she divided the students into two groups: browneyed kids and blue-eyed kids. One student, Jarred, relayed his story, "I saw my uncle Teachers and students. The Civil War simulation tapped into students' empathy and horror, and the lab safety demo tapped into disgust Students seem to have Story At this point, you a student in introductory accounting become part of the story. When you tell a story about Queen Nefertiti, students Simple: Anchoring in students' knowledge of weather (New York vs. //

As far as Dewey's inquiry, construction, communication and expression, I am not sure that this site aligns with any of them. It may, however, appeal to the students' desire to take short cuts. I can see this being helpful in several ways. First, you can use it as an example of why taking a short cut will not help you in the end. As you can see, neither of these summaries gives a clear idea of what the text is actually about. Along with that, you can show that not all tools on the internet are helpful. Also, it could be used as an example of how to not write a summary. Maybe I was using the wrong types of texts, but both examples entered into this site were trimmed into summaries that were at best incoherent and at worse, utter nonsense.