Computer Technology Department

Essential Knowledge and Skills

In this advanced journalism elective, students learn about the concept of "convergence" as it applies to the new media. Students will create online content for the school web site, learn computer graphic arts for the school newspaper, audio editing for podcasting, and digital film making for TV production. The class size is limited. Application portfolio is required. Students may apply this credit towards the Arts requirement.

Indicators of Student Learning

Upon the completion of this course, students will:

• Understand the history and evolution of media.

• Identify and evaluate news values for today’s media consumers.

• Employ the writing process as it relates to journalism (brainstorming, questioning, reporting, gathering and synthesizing information, writing, editing, and evaluating the final media product).

• Use a variety of forms of journalistic writing (i.e. news, features, opinion, etc.) and their appropriate style (i.e. Associated Press, multiple sources with attribution, punctuation, etc.) additional forms unique to journalism (i.e. headlines, cut lines, visual presentations, etc.)

• Understand the importance of matching language use, angle, and style with intended audience.

• Value the skills needed to package media products effectively, using various forms of journalistic design utilizing a range of visual, auditory and interactive methods for a variety of media.

• Value photojournalism as a way to tell stories in compelling ways.

• Utilize appropriate professional and scholastic media legal and ethical policies and practices.

• Ensure students understand media’s role in a democracy and their part in preserving it.

• Relate law and ethics to scholastic media and its importance in practice.

• Understand and apply the role of leadership training, fiscal responsibility, and conflict resolution and time management in student publications production.

• Know the importance of effective information design for all media.

• Learn how to use computers as teaching and production tools.

• Use text, graphics, photography, radio, television, and new media as appropriate to emphasize the range of story-telling possibilities.

• Encourage creative approaches to information design and packaging it for student media.

• Construct and utilize financial guidelines for scholastic media relating to subscriptions, advertising, activity funds, and fund raising.

• Construct and utilize staff organizational models that emphasize responsibility, risk-taking and problem solving.

• Construct and utilize production schedules that encourage scholastic journalists to mirror that of professional journalists.

• Ensure students understand their roles as informational gatekeepers in school-based media and their rights and responsibilities as journalists.

• Understand and apply the rights and responsibilities within a journalism education environment.

• Develop the conditions that enhance the development of life-long learning.

• Analyze methods to help students understand and use media.

• Know how students’ diverse backgrounds, attitude, interests and expectations influence their communication skills.

• Understand the interrelationship and concurrent development of each communication skill (reading, writing, speaking, listening, etc.)

• Learn ways the public forms its opinions and the process/interaction involved. Indicators of Student Learning (continued)

• Effectively use of research in a mass media setting.

• Use questioning to show understanding, help students articulate their ideas and thinking processes, promote risk-taking and problem-solving, facilitate recall of information, encourage thinking, stimulate curiosity and help students to question on their own.

• Value conferencing with individual students.

• Help create environments that support learning about various aspects of the media.

• Create an atmosphere that addresses the students’ needs for a sense of belonging to the school and to the larger community as journalism/media users.

• Investigate their own biases and seek to resolve problems that stem from areas of conflict.

Assessments

Upon the completion of this course students will:

• Demonstrate increased competency in Written Language as evidenced in electronic portfolio.

• Demonstrate increased proficiency in research, inquiry and oral presnentation by expressing ideas clearly, explaining research process, presenting ideas and information in written and oral forms.

• Demonstrate competency in technology by creating multimedia presentations.