Advising Student Media
Advisers will also benefit from tried and true approaches to student media and practical ideas to take their program to the next level.
Regardless if you’re a new adviser or a seasoned veteran, all journalism teachers will leave our workshop more prepared than ever to tackle the challenges of the ever-evolving scholastic journalism classroom.
Some of the topics covered will include advising time management hacks, ideas for updating staff manuals and policies, dealing with student leaders, different personalities, and conflict — and more.
Leadership and Media Management
Learn the keys to great leadership and managing your student publication
This course is designed to teach student leaders the skills to become effective editors on their publication staff. Whether you lead a team of 5 staff members or 50, this session covers leadership skills, staff organization, morale and motivation. By the end of camp, you are fully equipped with materials and skills to return to school and charge into battle.
Design
Anyone can put words and pictures on a page, but you must understand the basics if you want to do it well. Those basic design elements and concepts will be a focus for us as we learn what makes a page or spread a good design. Eyelines, typography, dominants, sidebars and packaging will all be discussed with the hope that you will leave class with some design ideas to take back to the rest of your staff back at school. Not only will you have designs to take back, but you will hopefully have a set of new design vocabulary words and the confidence to talk design with your peers and help each other get better.
Writing and Reporting
The Writing course would delve into how to capture a reader’s attention – and then keep them. As yearbook and newspaper students, high school journalists are tasked with writing a variety of types of stories. These will range from breaking news, news stories, features, investigative stories, opinion and sports.
The goal of this course is to help each student succeed in whatever story is assigned. Oftentimes writers have their strengths and preferences, but as we all know, writers must adapt, be flexible and write interesting, accurate stories no matter what the topic or type is.
Students will get hands-on experience with interviewing and writing stories through the course of the workshop.
Photojournalism
In this class, students will learn about the basics of the camera (shutter speed, aperture and ISO) as well as some basic and advanced Photoshop tricks. Topics to be discussed will include photographing people, capturing moments, photography composition, shooting in low light, portrait studio lighting, photography workflow, photojournalism ethics and many others. Students will create a tightly edited selection of their work that they can add to their portfolios, and all photographers will contribute to the end-of-workshop slide show.
Radio Bootcamp
In this session students will get to experience everything entailed in running a radio station at the oldest continuous student radio station in the country.
Social Media Essentials
Social media has become an essential component of student media programs in the 21st Century.
Students will learn best practices for social media and branding that can immediately be applied to student media. Learn how to create engaging social media content, about new and emerging platforms, and how to grow your audience for breaking news or promoting the yearbook.
Drone Photography
In this class students will be introduced to the basic operation of Small Unmanned Aerial Systems (Drones). We will discuss the best practices to capture both photo and video and the techniques of using drones for professional storytelling practices. We will look at the sUAS equipment and talk about safety protocols. We will talk about ethical practices, where the public’s right to know, the creator’s freedom of speech, and the public’s right to privacy co-exist when it comes to using a sUAS and how to avoid issues.
Finally (Weather Permitting) students will go outdoors to try their hand at flying a few basic moves with the drones.