Teaching MS Intro to Video Journalism

[MomsL8]

Hi there: I'm beginning a MS journalism program - video production only- in my school. I taught HS journalism before - many years before - but I am having difficulty finding appropriate material for an intro course geared toward Middle Schoolers, yet I want to teach them solid foundations.

I have a course outline started, and I will focus the first two months on ethics, digital citizenship, and reporting/writing/interviewing, and then begin camera basics, editing, and production - all in hopes we will produce a monthly magazine show.

Our high school is fortunate that they have great equipment and materials in order to produce a daily show.

Has anyone else done this - and can anyone point me in the direction of some good supplementary materials - I know as I develop the curriculum, I'll need to tweak and adjust, so I would like some prepared materials to help me while I manage this first year.

Thanks!

[PhilHarris]

You might want to look at my textbook, Television Production. As far as I know, it is the only text out there about professional television production written on a high school level with a focus on students entering the television production industry for a career. There is a student workbook and an instructor’s CD-ROM available also. The CD-ROM contains syllabus, curriculum, timeline, all handouts and forms I ever used teaching the course, grading contracts, classroom management techniques, web site for resources, as well as a chapter by chapter breakdown with each chapter’s section containing more activities than you will ever have time to do, discussion questions, answer keys to questions at the end of chapter and workbook. Finally there are tests for every chapter and, of course, the answer keys to the tests. Everything on the CD-ROM that might be seen by students – handouts, tests, etc. is written in Word format as well as .pdf. I talked the publisher into putting them into Word so if any teacher wants to use the document but needs to alter the content to match their situation, they can easily do change the document.

The publisher is Goodheart-Willcox Co., Inc. The home page is www.g-w.com. To order an examination copy you can click on the “ordering tab” at the top of the page. The actual page dedicated to my book is http://www.g-w.com/products/detail.asp?id=253 . You can order books on this page as well. You can see a couple of chapters on the web page for the book. If you scroll down toward the bottom of the page, there are links to the two chapters.

[WritingInStereo]

Ours is a focussed broadcast news style writing model--Writing in Stereo--but it includes the writing paradigm (MicWriter), the technology integration (TechLighter) and the creative (radio dramatic) component (Spark'Niter), too. In your journalism classes you focussed on the writing: news, 5 W's, inverted pyramid, features, etc. Remember? Unfortunately, video technology forces the teacher into an emphasis on TV production. Nothing wrong with that, but you have only so much time in a class period. Using our emphasis on radio or podcasting, you're freed up to teach the kids to write.

We can help you, and right now the advice is free. Writinginstereo@gmail.com
Also, we blog at http://writinginstereo.podbean.com/