The Role of Summarizing Tools in Today’s Classroom

Summarizing is the process of shortening a piece of text and conveying it in a concise form that conveys all the main points. Students can need to summarize text for different purposes in the classroom – such as when they have to write a synopsis or a precis as a class exercise.

Manually creating a summary can be time-consuming. It requires the student to read the text and then take out all the main points from it. Then, they have to compile those points coherently in a summary.

Nowadays, there is a much quicker and easier solution available for creating summaries, i.e., summarizing tools. In this post, we’re going to look at what summarizing tools are and what role they play in today’s classrooms.

What is a Summarizing Tool?

A summarizing tool uses artificial technologies (AI) to summarize the text you give it. Basically, it comes up with the main points discussed in the text. Depending on the specific tool that you’re using, the summary generated can either be in abstractive form or extractive form.

An extractive summary is that in which the sentences from the original passage or text are used. In other words, the most meaningful sentences are taken out and pieced together to form the summary.

On the other hand, an abstractive summary is that in which the original passage is understood and then a new summary is created from scratch, i.e., using different words. 

Some tools also have an options which will find out and tell the best line of the text you give it that describes the main purpose of the text.

Role of Summarizing Tools For Students

Now, it’s time to take a look at the role of summarizing tools in the life of a student. Summarizing tools can be used to do 3 basic tasks:

• Help in researching
• Help in creating abstracts or precis
• Help in shortening content to meet word limits

That’s sound helpful, right? Then let’s take a closer look at how it is going to help you in these 3 things. 

Researching

Summarizers performs a major role when you are researching. Whether you are researching to write a research paper or just give an answer to a question, summarizers will be proven a useful tool for you. How? It’s simple.

Suppose, when you are researching data, there is a huge research paper that comes up. It’s more than 5,000 words. If you read it, it will take you anywhere from a few minutes to hours. A better way? Just paste the research paper into the summarizer, and it will give you the main points.

Now, you don’t have to waste your time reading the paper, as summarizer just came up with the main points that are discussed in the paper. This is one of the major benefits of using a summarizing tool.

Creating Abstracts/Precis

Sometimes, you might have to write a precis. A precis is basically a summary of a text or speech. The traditional process of writing a summary is:

1. Read the text/speech
2. Divide it into chucks
3. List down the key points of each chucks/section
4. And summarize the text/speech.

That’s how you write a summary with using a tool. And when you are using a tool, it’s much simpler. You just have to enter your content and get the output.

And you are done. The tool will come up with the summary of the text in form of a paragraphs or bullet points. That’s how easy makes the process of writing a summary. At the end, you can check it against your original text/speech to ensure the accuracy. But, AI summarizers are accurate most of the times. 

Shortening Content to Meet Word Limits

Sometimes, you are writing in a flow, and don’t even remember what’s going on to the word count. And when you are doing, the writing that was supposed to be 2,000 words, you’ve written it in 3,000 words. That might sound good, but no, it isn’t if seen as a teacher point of view.

Teachers have given the word limit so you have to write something in the given word count. Now what? It’s simple. Summarize what you have written to make it shorter. And instead of summarizing manually, use a summarizing tool. 

This is an extremely helpful use of summarizing tools nowadays for students.

Conclusion

A summarizing tool is used to summarize text using AI technologies which makes your work much easier. One of the most common place where summarizing tools are used are classrooms.

The features of summarizing tools are very useful for student and teachers. And in this article, we have discussed the 3 main roles of summarizing tools for students. 

We hope this article was helpful for you to understand how you can utilize this amazing tool. Thanks for reading!