Teaching the Teacher

A new semester is just about upon me, and I've got my work cut out! Essentially, I've reformatted my newswriting class to better match what my students now must know. The first thing to go was the title; it's now called Writing and Reporting for the Media. This semester, my goal is that they learn not just the basics of newswriting and reporting, but how to translate some of that to reporting for electronic and new media. Of course, they'll blog. And this will transform some of the assignments I've given in the past. For one, I've always given them a taste of publishing by having them doing a story on a classmate, compiled by me into a newsletter for the class. This semester, they'll post these to a wiki site or a blog--haven't decided yet. So, you see, I'll have my work cut out every step of the way--but I think it'll be fun.