Lesson One: To understand news is to be a better citizen

   Welcome Intro to Photojournalism students!

   Get ready to stock your photography portfolio, extend your social media reach and improve your writing skills.  

   Lesson One: What is news? This lesson seemed to freak a few of you out, considering half the class admitted to not reading, listening or watching the news...at all. Don’t worry! It’s normal to feel skeptical about learning the news business.  News is a gigantic concept that's hard to wrap your head around because there is so much of it, and it’s often negative. But news, despite all of its ugliness, is what keeps our society going. To be informed and engaged in your local community is to be a better citizen.

   In this class you will not only learn what news is, but you will actually generate real visual news. Each of you will have your own beat on campus, and you will cover the students and faculty in that beat for the entire semester. Your photo stories will be worth more than a grade; you’ll be working for the Owens Outlook newspaper, as well.

   Fear not... you’ll mostly cover ‘soft’ news (nothing heavy or controversial; mostly educational and informative). So, tomorrow you will choose your beats (technology, nursing, automotive, culinary, etc.) and then get started on your new, exciting adventure of being scholastic photojournalists!

Intro to PJ blog to include KSU's Teaching Multimedia class

   This blog was created for Intro to Photojournalism students in 2011. It is a great social media tool for documenting course objectives and highlighting student achievements.
   But that's about to change.
   Beginning Aug. 26 this blog will be shared with students from my Teaching Multimedia course at Kent State University. The Teaching MM course is an online graduate-level class for high school English and journalism teachers/advisers across the nation who want to learn more about using basic multimedia tools in their classrooms and with their student journalism publications. This will be my first time to teach that course.
   I actually was a student in that class in 2009. It's where I learned how to blog and tweet. Needless to say that class fundamentally changed how I communicate with students. In fact, my primary blog, Lori King's Blog, was one of my homework assignments! Teaching MM students will also learn how to capture and edit audio, produce a Soundslides project and shoot a video story.
   I will also be sharing the @intro2pj Twitter account with that class, as well.
   I'm confident students (and myself) in both courses will benefit by learning from one another.