Thanks again to everyone who came out for our 75th Anniversary State Convention this weekend! For a complete list of award winners from this weekend, download the file below. Also check out our Facebook site for pictures from the weekend!
School buses can park in the Northeast Campus lot, located near the Rec Center. Click here to view the transportation map.
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The tentative schedule is posted online! Room numbers for sessions will be announced soon. Email aspa.ua.edu with questions. Also, check out our newsletter to find out all you need to know about State Convention and more!
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We’re getting excited about State Convention, so much so that today’s post comes from Mary Morrow, who teaches fine arts at St. Clarion High School. Morrow lists all of her favorite memories from State over the last few years, including a few unlikely things such as props and theme music.
For more information about State Convention, check out our newsletter.
The St. Clairion has been going to ASPA convention for five years. The first year we went we really did not know what to expect so we arrived in Tuscaloosa with our staff shirts on and notebooks in hand. What we discovered was a group that celebrated journalism with our own familiar dedication and creativity. We were hooked, and we’ve gone every year since. I have the privilege to work with an amazing staff. Their commitment, creativity, and spirit always inspires me…yes, even during the dreaded deadlines.
At our school, yearbook is one of its most visible, respected, and celebrated groups. Their confidence and creativity naturally finds its way into whatever they do–including convention. Just as we are always trying to be creative and innovative with our yearbook, we try to bring that to convention.
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Today’s guest post comes from Laura Hunter, who taught sessions at Fall Regional Workshop and will be back in February at State Convention! Today she writes in with help for writers struggling for inspiration. Her advice? Photos!
Imagination on Vacation?
Sometimes it just happens. You cannot find a creative thought in your head. Your imagination shuts down as if it’s exhausted from a 5K run.
Get out your digital camera or your phone. Snap a picture or two to jump-start your creativity.
(via Phillip Kalantzis Cope)
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Today’s guest post comes from Dan Sinker, who heads up the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership for Mozilla. He taught in the journalism department at Columbia College Chicago from 2008-2011.
I had a brief exchange on Twitter yesterday, with ProPublica’s Scott Klein, about how high school poets end up as journalists and how he hopes that high school mathletes start to follow the same path. The basic idea was that kids are turned on to something at a young age and then search for viable career paths to follow. So for a high-school poet, they look around and think “I like to write, what professions are going to let me become a kick-ass writer.” Traditionally, journalism has absorbed a lot of those folks and has been stronger for it. Now, posited Klein, with the ascendancy of data journalism and the growing need for high-level developers to break news by crunching numbers, the hope is that kids that are switched on to math will draw the same conclusion and wind up revolutionizing journalism. But, I countered, how many high school newspapers are doing data journalism right now? Because that’s the first step. My guess? Not many—and that’s a loss.
Because Klein is right: there is ample space for math geeks, stats nerds, number-crunchers and many more in journalism. It’s a place they should be playing. And you can see, with each stat-heavy report, with each number-savvy data visualization, that some are starting to. But nowhere near enough.
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Today ASPA President Melissa Dixon weighs in on why critiques are so important. To submit your student’s work for critiques, visit our “Contests and Critiques” page.
It’s hard to believe that the holidays are just around the corner, and all of us are deep into this year’s publications. While you are trying to maintain some sort of sanity through the deadlines while somehow still teaching your assigned classes, have you ever wondered if you are on the right track? Maybe you need a seasoned adviser to review your publications to offer some helpful hints. This is exactly why journalism critiques can be so helpful.
If you haven’t entered your publications for a critique or contest, I encourage you to do so. The deadline is early December, and the process couldn’t be easier. Plus, you will receive a wealth of accolades, suggestions, and sound advice to push your publications to the next level. National advisers who’ve spent years in the trenches will help you kick it up a notch, guide you toward correct journalistic styles, and offer updates on the latest publication trends. You might even place in the contests!
Your staffs work hard and deserve the recognition. Visit the ASPA website and click the tab for critiques. Send in your materials and then join us at our 75th anniversary in February as we announce the contest and critique results.
I’m looking forward to seeing you all in Tuscaloosa this February.
Melissa Dixon teaches journalism at Oak Mountain High School in Birmingham. Questions about critiques? Email us at aspa@ua.edu.
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Attorney Frank LoMonte from the Student Press Law Center weighs in on high school censorship.
For schools facing censorship issues from their administration, Attorney Frank LoMonte examines what advisers and journalism staffs can do in face of this common challenge.
With schools across the country fixated on the plague of bullying, including “cyberbullying” on social networking sites, it may seem counter-intuitive to argue for the rights of students to express themselves free from administrative censorship.
But regardless of what some school administrators may think, journalism is not a problem for schools – it’s a solution.
The values that young people learn when they participate in journalism – checking their facts, entertaining opposing points of view, accepting responsibility, correcting their mistakes, considering the legal and ethical consequences of what they publish – are the values that every school official wants students to exhibit as citizens of the online world. Schools should be embracing journalism more tightly than ever.
Regrettably, too many do the opposite. Hundreds of times a year, the attorney hotline at the Student Press Law Center rings with the story of a student whose newspaper has been impounded, or whose faculty adviser has been threatened with firing, for nothing more than – in the favored terminology of principals and superintendents – “making the school look bad.”
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Julie Dodd is a journalism professor at the University of Florida.
This week we are excited to feature Julie Dodd, a journalism professor at the University of Florida and JEA Mentor Committee co-chair. She is here with advice on engaging students who take journalism electives.
(This is article is reposted from JEA Mentoring Matters)
Advice on how to respond to students who expect an elective journalism class to be ‘fun and easy’
Here’s a question I received from a new journalism teacher:
I have a couple of students who have told me that because journalism is an elective, they think it should be more fun. They’re not fans of reading and writing activities, so I’m struggling a bit with trying to find more of a balance. How do you handle students who equate ‘elective’ with ‘fun and easy?’ I’m sure this comes up all the time, but I’d appreciate some advice. Thanks!
[I checked with the new journalism teacher, and the course she is referring to is a non-publication course. My answer is a little different than what it would be if the course were a publication course, producing the newspaper or yearbook.]
Let’s start with the “fun” part of journalism as an elective.
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