The Web as classroom tool
Journalism teachers share their favorite sites for building lesson plans and making your life easier
by Gary Clites
Originally published in the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund’s Adviser Update, Winter 2008
Journalism educators advise their students in the creation of newspapers, television shows, yearbooks, magazines and Web sites. Advisers, though, are also classroom teachers, and the demands of this dual role can be daunting. The Web can be a tool not only in building a journalism product, but also in helping to run a journalism classroom as well.
Everyone should be familiar with scholastic journalism's mega-site, the American Society of Newspaper Editors' HighSchoolJournalism.org and its sister broadcasting site, the Radio-Television News Directors Foundation's High School Broadcast Journalism Project (hsbj.org). A raft of lesser known sites, however, offer tools any communications teacher can use to help run the journalism classroom. To find them, I posted a request on the JEA and RTNDF listservs asking advisers for the sites they find most valuable. Following are the sites they love.
One of the least known, but most comprehensive, resources for journalism teachers is Ball State's excellent J-IDEAS site (www.jideas.org). It includes up-to-date news on J-ed issues, copious information and studies on student press freedom, and good resources for guiding students toward relevant story topics. But where J-IDEAS really shines is in the resources it offers for building lessons in the journalism classroom. For just the cost of shipping, the site offers a number of DVD's on subjects like business reporting, sports journalism and the First Amendment. Under Multimedia Resources, you'll find over two dozen streaming video interviews with significant sources on important topics you can easily share with your students.
Struggling to build a lesson on an unfamiliar subject? Several sites offer usable plans for the journalism classroom.
• Teachnology (www.teach-nology.com/teachers/lesson_plans/literature/journalism) listed 34 lessons perfect for the journalism classroom at press time.
• Lesson Plan Central (lessonplancentral.com/lessons/Language_Arts/Journalism) offered 25 on plenty of useful subjects.
• Ron Hartung and Gerald Grow's Newsroom 101 (www.newsroom101.com) focuses on grammar and the A.P. Stylebook. Among other assets, it offers easy to use quizzes on the stylebook as well as numerous quizzes and exercises on newsroom issues, and all sorts of grammar and usage issues that can be very useful as prescriptive tools with your students.
Interested in deepening your own knowledge of journalism, but don't have the time to take a class? The Poynter Institute's News University (www.newsu.org) offers dozens of classes online on nearly every communications subject imaginable. Designed primarily for use by professional reporters and editors, the courses are open to journalism educators at any level. Better, while some of them are traditional online classes charging a fee, most are condensed for easy scheduling and are available free and at your convenience. All you have to do is register with News U., create an account, and you can take as many courses as you'd like.
Want to guide your students to the kinds of sources and resources real journalists use to build their stories? Visit the Power Reporting Web site (www.powerreporting.org), a project of the Columbia Journalism Review. The site is an incredible resource organized under upward of 100 subject headings from "Arts" to "Work" that will help your reporters reach outside the school building for significant sources of information.
The Poynter Institute offers a site for students focused on generating story and design ideas for the newspaper (www.poynter.org/poynterhigh). At press time, there was guidance (including a QuickTime movie) about how to create a really cool double-truck along with dozens of teen oriented story ideas and guidance on all kinds of research and reporting issues. The page also includes a link to Al's Morning Meeting, a page by Al Tomkins including a column and tons of guidance on great story ideas.
Photography is a subject which ink and paper journalism teachers often find difficult to teach. Good examples help, and the Guardian Unlimited's 24 Hours in Pictures site can provide them. A page on The Guardian of London's Web site, it offers "A selection of the best images from around the world," with pictures that change daily. Images are displayed in a slideshow format, but each can be easily e-mailed or printed for classroom use.
Looking for exemplars of great journalism for a lesson plan? Why not go for the very best? The Pulitzer Prizes Web site (www.pulitzer.org) offers more than just a list of winners. Starting with the 1995 winners, the site offers the actual articles and materials that won the Pulitzers online. Teaching investigative reporting, criticism, editorial writing, etc.? Why not show your students the Pulitzer winners in each category for the last 12 years? For broadcast teachers, the fairly new School Tube (www.schooltube.com) offers examples of student broadcasts and stories from across the country.
Journalism teachers need to remember that the web can be more than a way for students to communicate. It is a powerful tool in breaking the isolation of the journalism classroom and helping us all work and plan together.
Thanks to: Betsy Ahlersmeyer, Gerry Appel, Linda Barrington, Noreen Connolly, Janet Kerby, Carol Knopes, Ed McDonough, Eston Melton, Mark Newton, Leslie Nicholas, April Powell, Tracy Ann Sena, and Elizabeth Walsh for their contributions to this article.
© Gary Clites, 2008