Be a story teller, no matter what the medium

My brain is full. Totally full.


This is a good thing except for when I try to pick one thing to write about. Here's just one of the many things I thought about today.


Dave Seibert upped the ante for my expectations for my newspaper staff. His advice to our students in the face of quickly evolving technology and changing demands on journalists was "Be a story teller." He reminded us that technology will continue to change but that there will always be stories to tell. I had one student last year (one of my editors-in-chief--Eli) who knew this implicitly and did some great work for the newspaper, but I feel like I can now unpack this more explicitly. That's the thing about effective teaching, making the implicit explicit. You've got to really know what you're teaching in order to make it explicit for your students so they can see clearly what it is they are working toward. I'm starting to see it more clearly and find the words to articulate the goals to my students better than I ever have before.


Last year, my staff launched the online version of our newspaper. Eli decided on his own to produce some video content to publish on the website. His first piece was a personality profile on one of our students who DJs a jazz radio show on the local public radio station:




This video ran as web content to support a written profile published on the same student in our first print version of the school year (and Eli won a second place award from the Colorado High School Press Association for the piece). I was thrilled that Eli did the video, but I looked at it as somewhat of an extra for the staff--I didn't expect the rest of my staff would produce the same kind of video story telling. 


But now I see that they must. If my students wish to be journalists, they must be able to tell stories with words, with photos, with video, and with various combinations of those tools. Dylan Smith made this very clear this afternoon. He told us that journalists need to be great at telling stories with all of these tools and must be able to publish that content to the web. I have the infrastructure to support this with our online paper (hosted by School Newspapers Online), and I have a good start with the equipment that my students will need. What's left is to figure out not only how to teach them to tell stories with more than just words, but to figure out how to make them really want to and to develop a real passion for it.


Sarah M. Zerwin
Fairview High School
Boulder, Colo.