Reflecting on the last two weeks

Cornhole, what a strange name for a fun game.  The team competition was lively and fun.  Thank you Mike for organizing the Yankee gift exchange.  It was a great way to end the week.  I love my Sedona shirt and am anxious to see Maureen in the Sedona movie.


As I think about the last two weeks, I am overwhelmed by all I have learned.  I am so excited about restructuring my journalism program.  I finally feel confident to take a real dive onto the Web.  But in addition to the great information and ideas, I also am very thankful for the collaboration with all of you.  I do not often get the chance to connect with other journalism teachers and advisers.  MY PLC's are all English based.  I have learned so much just by talking with all of you.  Thank you for being so willing to share.

When I learned that next year would be the last year of this program, it made me feel blessed that I finally applied and was chosen this year.  I really hope more funding is found and that Steve and Alan can continue.

Here's to a great year.

Lisa Shapiro
Northwest High School
Germantown, MD

Reflecting and looking forward

Gregory Favre will sum up this experience and what comes next much better than I can in the scramble to get everyone to the airport. But as I prep for one last morning together I can't resist offering some thoughts on our whirlwind two weeks.

I'm thinking back to that first Sunday night of building tours and introductions and comparing that to the corn hole/Yankee swap crew of last night. You've created a family that will continue online, at JEA conventions, etc. The Cronkite School and your time here will fast become context for something much more valuable.

I'm also imagining what you will accomplish not just in your schools but in your communities and states. If you've found a lesson or strategy helpful or have developed a new interest here, share it. That includes the materials you are taking home.
Thanks for your attention and hard work throughout our time together. I look forward to following your successes through the Facebook group. Please drop a line now and then and let us know how you're doing.

You're welcome to keep posting to the blog (especially if you still owe me posts).

Steve Elliott
Arizona State University
Phoenix
steventelliott.com (domain now protected against online horrors)

Reaching Resolution

Photograph taken for the multimedia project.  I usually take very tight shots of people.  This was an experiment in trying to capture a slice of life that would fit well with video footage of the urban campus setting.  (Photo by Bonnie Katzive) 

Well, there is a more than double meaning to my post title.  First of all, we are about to leave the most wonderful summer camp.  In spite of the roasty Phoenix heat, I have loved getting to know this city (food trucks!  Farmer's market!  art galleries!) and all the wonderful instructors and my 34 learning partners.  It has been a transformative journey with the best traveling partners.

I am grateful because I know that I will feel the power of this experience for a long time in my teaching. From the many demonstrations of how to use the 10-2 strategy to the  professional modeling of writing, social media, media literacy, editing,  photography, design, coaching, and presentation, I feel refreshed and like a much better resource for my students.  Thank you so much to all the professionals who generously gave their time to help us learn and teach.

PhotoShop enhancement of a photo taken from my hotel room window using a Canon "nifty fifty" lens.  I only used the 50 on my DSLR while in Phoenix.  Great experiment in learning the virtues and limits of the lens. Levels are a more powerful adjustment than I had previously realized and I like how I used this one simple adjustment to make the photo pop a little more.  (Photo by Bonnie Katzive)

But I did experience many frustrations with technology and I learned great lessons about how much my students might have to constantly retool their efforts to meet requirements.  My keyboard died right after arriving, the email client on my iPad keeps failing, my iPad has problems running Blogger correctly, and my photo card had a heart attack this afternoon before I could get all my photos downloaded .  It has been workarounds and adjustments on a daily basis for me.  And I guess that's how it is when we work under deadline.  Between those difficulties and the craziness of completing the multimedia project and helping today with resolving some hiccups with SNO, I have grown in my empathy for how complex doing schoolwork with tech platforms gets for my students.  I owe them structure and support to be successful, even when the tools won't cooperate and I have a MUCH stronger sense of what it feels like to be a modern reporter or editor.

On the bright side (and truly, all I really will remember is that), technology instruction has been unwrapped so beautifully for me.  Thank you to classmates (Aaron Fitzpatrick, Mike Simons, Eva Coleman and everyone else who showed me something new I could do with my phone, iPad, or camera) and to Steve Elliott, Alan Weintraut,Tracy Collins, Dave Seibert, Steve Doig and the other experts who modeled for me HOW to teach Adobe Creative Suite, computer-assisted reporting skills, and more and reminded me of how these tools and design skills function in our efforts to tell a story.  I previously knew a lot of miscellany about how everything worked and could sort of problem solve around my training gaps (or say to the kids, "Hey, here is where to find tutorials and models"), but I didn't really understand how to explain aperture or the power of fixing the leading.  Just because we know something does not mean we have figured out the best teaching strategy.  Now I have the tools to teach how to use the tools. 

I feel lighter inside, like a ball of tension around that responsibility has melted off.  I am ready to go home, but I am taking this whole experience (and many handouts as well as 4-6G of digital files) back to help me, my students, and my colleagues in Journalism and ELA.




Bonnie Katzive
Monarch High School
Louisville, CO


Best part of the Reynolds Institute... Meeting so many great people

It's hard to know where to begin or where to end when listing all of the many wonderful things about this conference— the great teachers and presenters, the outstanding facilities, the comfortable hotel accommodations and the great food.

Steve Elliott, Alan Weintraut and Anita Luera are the beginning of a long list of wonderful and competent teachers, hosts, presenters and mentors, but they are not the ones that I want to recognize in this blog post. I may forget much of what they tried to teach me, but I'll never forget the way they treated me.

The memories that I will cherish most are the conversations I've shared, the lessons I've learned and the many acts of kindness and friendship from my fellow teachers and colleagues. The new friends that I have made over the past couple of weeks are what I will remember the most.

 Thanks to Michael Simons for reminding me that it's OK to be a little nerdy when it comes to technology.  Thanks also to Michael for organizing fun stuff to do, even if I did not always join in.

Thanks to Rudy and Eva for helping me with Final Cut Pro when I wanted to scream and give up.

Thanks to Bailey and Maureen for making sure we completed our multi-media project with four full minutes to share. (God Bless you ladies.)

Thanks to Claudia for teasing me about the Heat beating the Spurs. I know I had it coming.

Thanks to Zach, Spencer, Aaron and others for reminding me what it's like to be young and have fun.

Thanks to everyone on my editing team who did an outstanding job on their stories and photos. Thanks to Joe Garcia, Steve Elliott and the other volunteer editors for helping on that project too.

Thanks to everyone else for many reasons that I am too tired to list tonight.  (Go Team Snails)

Best,

Scott F. Davis
Westville OK High School

Design -- Find Your Inspiration

Tracy Collins' presentation today was familiar territory with some wonderfully refreshing new ideas and approaches that I'll be able to take back to my yearbook class. I enjoyed his wit and his examples, and I've got profound respect for his experience in the field.

About this time last year, my 2013 staff stumbled across Computer Arts Collection, a bi-monthly compendium published by Computer Arts Magazine.  We were in the midst of the search for our 2013 visual voice, and the kids scoured magazines to find something that really caught their eye.

In each CAC, they featured a design or creative media firm and that organization's approach to a particular project, start to finish.  The magazine itself is beautifully designed, and in one issue, my kids found a profile on a company called Vault 49.  The feature was awesome, but the CAC designs in the article were fantastic–exactly what our kids needed.

Computer Arts Collection -- "Illustration" -- Vol 1 Part 3, 2012.
 Profile on Vault 49 creative agency. 

We ripped out all of the profile's pages from CAC, put them on our wall, and started looking for other editions of CAC online and in print to use as inspiration pieces.

We also revisited a font I discovered in Minnesota during a gallery installation on graphic design. I was taken with the font superfamily "Trilogy" by Jeremy Tankard in the UK, and shared it with the kids.  They fell in love, we bought the font, and the rest is history.

A spread from Skjöld 2013, "They're / Their / There."
West HS yearbook, Corning-Painted Post N.Y. 

We had a concept for our visual voice, and we had 18 faces in a font family that gave us enormous creative space in which to develop the book.  You can see the DNA our book shares with the CAC spread in the examples above.  Our kids put it through what we call the "yearbook blender" and made it their own, but having that inspiration piece was invaluable.

As you look to design or redesign, or if you know that your students are those like Collins mentioned today who'll want to use 17 fonts and five colors all on one spread, I can't recommend to you enough to find an inspiration piece and let it guide you.

-Mike Simons

West HS / East HS 

Corning-Painted Post, N.Y.

Let's talk about type, ba-by

Okay, so I love typography. It's truly amazing how a typeface can evoke emotion. Design can also evoke emotion and create hierarchy. That's pretty powerful.

I know it's not clear, but I didn't want to distract the presentation with a flash. Plus, I Instagrammed this - I can't help myself sometimes. 

Tracy Collins is a phenomenal presenter. He kept us interested using humor and audience engagement. From the 10 Commandments of Type with background Gregorian chanting to putting us in the "hot seat" by asking us whether we liked certain designs and why, he made a three-hour presentation fly by. 

I absolutely relished the opportunity to see the papers and yearbook pages that some of my fellow participants worked so hard on. I was super impressed! Bonnie's newspaper design especially stood out to me. I can only hope to design a publication of that caliber! 

From Collins' presentation, I learned about designing stories in "modules" to increase readability. I also learned that when you have a heavily designed story, you don't need a specialty font. I loved how he taught us using lots of examples. I try to do this in my classes as well. And the longer I teach, the better the examples I accumulate. I think it is important to always be thinking about finding examples and filing them away as you find them. 

Meghann Peterson

Chanhassen High School

Chanhassen, Minn. 

Sports Photography -- Light it Up!

Disclaimer:  If your sports conference/association/confederation/governing body prohibits flash in the gym, then by all means, follow their rules.

Otherwise, I'd like to share some things for you to think about.



Gyms (and many other spaces in our schools) are black holes into which light and good exposures are thrown.  Good DSLRs paired with good, bright lenses (low aperture, f/2.8) paired with educated photographers can produce good photographs.  There are sacrifices, though, and shooting sports at 1600 or 3200 ISO on Tv/S (shutter priority) at 1/250th or higher to stop the action can result in dark photos (if you use a cheap lens) or grainy photos (because the ISO is set so high).

One solution is to add flash.

The pop-up flashes are generally good for nothing.  They illuminate the 10 feet or so immediately in front of the camera, and that's about it.

The tool you really want in this situation (and for many, many more, I'd add) is an accessory strobe or "speedlight" (or "speedlite").  Canon and Nikon each make a few, some at a lower level (think: JV) and others will all the bells and whistles (think: varsity).  Prices range from around $300 to over $600.

I'm now in favor of the Yongnuo 565 EX, which is a Chinese-manufactured knockoff.

It retails for about $160, which makes it incredibly attractive.  It's constructed solidly enough to last you awhile, and has all the features your staff would need to take their photography (sports and otherwise) to the next level.

The strobe can be used on camera, and by spinning the head 180 degrees so it faces backwards, it can be bounced off the wall behind the photographer.  This takes a point source (the three-inch face of the strobe) and diffuses it into a much larger light source, producing a softer, more wraparound type of light.

Off-camera flash, high to camera right.

Add to this the Gadget Infinity V5 Duo flash trigger, and now you're really cooking with gas.  You mount a transmitter on the DSLR's hot shoe, and mount the strobe in the receiver.  Your flash can then be up to 100 feet or more away from the camera and it will still go off.  The possibilities are endless.

Again, off-camera, looks to be to camera
 right; look at the shadows. 

Flash helps stop action.  It freezes the frame, and allows you creative control and latitude in otherwise very limiting situations.  

Two lights, one on either side of the baseline.  Easy to do with a second flash and
another receiver from the Gadget V5 series.  This is very, very easy to do!

So–don't break any rules, but understand that there are more options out there.  If your AD or principal isn't a huge fan of flash, consider shooting practices with them first and getting the coaches used to them.  Shoot practice with and without flash, and print images at 8x10 locally. Take the pictures to a meeting and display them side by side --- ask the Powers That Be which images they'd like representing their school, team, or program.

Food for thought; I'm happy to answer any questions. 

-Mike Simons

West HS / East HS 

Corning-Painted Post, N.Y.