Here’s the next installment of OldeSchoolNews.com‘s Awareness Films. The film is about the Internet. Both the student and I agree that this isn’t as solid as the first piece — but we’ve both learned a lot along the way. Hopefully, we’ll see more Awareness Films over the summer. Future topics are slated to include Internet safety and recycling.
I am very pleased to present to you the first in a series of short, educational "filmstrips" produced by the staff of OldeSchoolNews.com. We’re calling them "Awareness Films." The first, produced by Zach, is called "Infection & You." Enjoy.
Our first podcast is up over at OldeSchoolNews. Melissa, our first student podcaster, did a great job of reading her profile of our school’s counselor. She was very nervous, but ultimately very proud of what she accomplished.
More to come, I hope, as students begin to get their current round of writing finished. The comment to the story is just why we’re publishing student work.
Mediashift, a new blog from PBS that will focus on New Media, made its debut yesterday. Looks pretty interesting:
And each week, I’ll pose a more pointed question to you all to get
Your Take. The following week, I’ll do a roundup of the best of what
you’ve offered to share with us. And once per week, I’ll do a feature
called Digging Deeper that will include deeper thinking and even
interviews. Eventually, I’ll start a weekly podcast, add audio and
video to the site, and do more stories that include you in a two-way
conversation.And I hope that together we can break the bonds of traditional
blogging and journalism. The more I think about the traditional way of
doing journalism, the more questions I have about it. If I’m a movie
critic, for instance, why does my view rate in importance? I got in
free to the movie, the movie stars are there for me to interview, why
do I know better than you?And as a journalist reporting a feature story or news story, why do
I only talk to the usual analysts and experts? Why are the same people
quoted over and over again in all the different news outlets? Are they
really that much smarter than you are?
I’m subscribed.
I’ve been really happy to see that my students are beginning to embrace the hyperlocal idea that I’ve been pushing for in regards to our school newspaper (this doesn’t seem like the right term anymore – -but what do you call it? Newsblog? Hyperlocal Journalism Site? Doesn’t really roll off the tongue, does it? Any suggestions?). We’ve got a long way to go, and I think I’d like to write more about what the quarter’s been like (maybe a podcast on what we’ve been up to) as we’ve gotten used to the idea that we’re writing online.
One good example of a hyperlocal story – one you won’t hear about anywhere else – is the recent theft of a camera from our computer lab. The story’s good on the basics, and is a big step for the writer who wrote it. You won’t see the story anywhere else, and it marks an important benchmark for the student who wrote it.
I’m very pleased that she would cover the issue in the first place, and I’ve enjoyed watching her writing improve as she starts relying more on her ideas and less on the words of her sources. (I even think she’s going to sign on to take the class again next quarter, in spite of the fact that I’ve already told her that she’ll be podcasting her stories after she writes them.)
Another story that I was especially pleased with this week is Rance’s editorial on Internet filtering. Although I want to look at filtering as a possible thesis topic, Rance proposed the story quite some time ago, and I tried to stay out of his way. (I wonder sometimes about how my enthusiasm for a particular topic or idea influences the way that a student proceeds. It’s a tricky issue.)
I’d like Rance to play more with some of the wording in the piece, but I thought it was ready to be published. (John Temple recently pointed out one distinct advantage that online journalism has over print — the ability to change the story after it first runs. I’m not one hundred percent comfortable with making changes to a "published" piece — but I think the web lends itself to such. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?)
One more note — I’ve turned off all the commenting screening that I was doing when the site first began. Feel free to share your thoughts with our student writers, if you so desire. It should be pretty easy, now that the bumbling teacher’s gotten out of the way.
Yes — there’s lots more to say about how we’ve put OldeSchoolNews.com together — but that’s info for another day.
Lisa Williams and her website are two of the reasons why we’re trying our own attempt at hyperlocal journalism. Over at Pressthink, she wrote a great piece about why she does what she does. There’s also a good chunk of history and process in the piece. Enjoy.
Spent a good chunk of our first quarter putting together a website for our new and improved student newspaper. The paper will be formally unveiled on Wednesday, but enough students and others know about it already that I don’t feel bad sharing it with you. Enjoy. Share your thoughts. We’re just getting started — but I’m pretty impressed with their work so far.
I have a whole new class of student journalists (five of them) this quarter, and we’ll be continuing to improve the site, adding pictures and, hopefully, creating a community of writing for our school. A note about student safety: All of the writers are using screennames, and all of our student sources are only identified by first name and last initial. How do you cite student sources in your online publications?
Here’s an entry into the Blogging 101 category — the latest installment of my "On Writing" column for the Fort Collins Coloradoan.
Blogging gives students real audiences
By Bud Hunt
Students today have access to a
huge network of writing and publishing tools via the Internet. And, to borrow a line from Martha Stewart,
that’s a good thing.
If you can send e-mail, and I am
guessing that many of you can, you can publish your writing online for the
world to see. This is great news for
students who wish to communicate their thoughts and ideas to others in their
communities or to students in other states or even half way across the world. It’s even better news for teachers, as we
know that there’s no better tool for improving writing than a real, non-teacher
audience for the students’ work. The
Internet, via weblogs or blogs, provides just such an opportunity.
According to Dave Winer, a blogger
since 1997, a blog is “the unedited voice of a person.” More specifically, a blog is a collection
of posts written for online publication. Blogs and bloggers cover almost all possible topics, from hurricane
disaster relief to creative writing pieces to dealing with candy
addiction.
Blogs are more and more becoming
first stops for those looking for news or information on the Internet. In the classroom and at home, blogs are
tools that students can use in order grow as writers and responsible citizens
in the digital world. At school, blogs
are not yet essential curricular tools, but they will be. While schools are still learning where
blogging fits into the curriculum, students are flexing their digital muscles
after school.
There are
several free sites out there that you can use to start a blog. Perhaps the best known of these is
Blogger. After a five-minute
registration, you can post your writing directly to the Internet. Many students use free websites like
Myspace, Xanga, and LiveJournal to tell stories about their lives,
share musical influences, and write about and discuss just about every topic
that you could possibly think of. On
their blogs, students are talking about the war in Iraq, how to help in the
aftermath of Katrina, and who the cutest kids are in class.
To get
started, try reading some blogs to get a feel for the genre. Perhaps the best way to do this is to use a
search engine that specifically searches blog posts. Two useful ones are Technorati and Icerocket. Try searching for a topic that you are
interested in and see what others have to say.
The
Internet is a big place – there might be some content out there that you find
objectionable. However, the vast
majority of bloggers are interested in opinions and viewpoints and good
writing. They will welcome you as you
begin to comment on their blogs and, preferably, starting your own.
Blogging allows students to both
practice their writing and to have a connection to the real world that exists
outside of the classroom. Interested in
astronomy? Start writing about and
linking to interesting astronomy websites. Along the way, you’ll meet others interested in astronomy and begin to
have conversations with them about your passion for starts and supernovas. You’ll also be taking control of your
learning in a powerful way that was unavailable to students just ten years
ago.
Because they contain hyperlinks,
blogs are a great way to visualize and show in practice how ideas connect to each
other.
Parents have an essential
responsibility and privilege to stay up on what their students are writing and
thinking about. They should even be
regular readers of their child’s blog – both to learn about what learning is
going on but also to become a partner in that learning. Because blogs are
public, parents should also read to make sure that students are protecting
themselves by not sharing too much personal information online – phone numbers
and home addresses are probably a no-no. Families should sit down together to review family Internet policies and
privacy concerns.
Of course,
parents can and maybe should start their own blogs to provide a positive model
for writing with their children. Ask
your child if you need help getting started. They might just already know how. One estimate says that teenagers are responsible for more than half of
the sixteen million blogs current online.
That’s a
lot of writing.
Bud Hunt is a board member of the Colorado State University
Writing Project. He blogs at http://www.budtheteacher.com.
Got principal approval today to run with the idea of an online school newspaper. That site is, I think, going to be the basis for a community hyperlocal site. Eventually.
The principal ‘s very supportive of what we do, and I’m grateful. Had a great conversation with him about my plans. As a bonus, I discovered that my principal’s son is a blogger.
I knew I liked him.
I’ve got eight students in my Journalism course. They seem receptive to the idea that we can cover Longmont better than any other news source. On Monday, they return with their first story ideas. We spent today examining some hyperlocal sites out there that we might model ours after. If we create our own, that is. At first, I didn’t want to create a website — I wanted to use someone else’s. But then I started fiddling around with some tools and realized how easy it can be.
Of course, there are advantages to participating in larger community projects. Could we submit original work to our site and to another one, though? Could we still participate in sharing news with others in other venues? Would there be copyright problems? Does being a school change the rules at all?
Just thinking my way into the weekend. If you know the answers, or have hunches, feel free to share them.
