New Student Newspaper

My main focus this year is teaching technology skills with authentic projects that have real audiences. At the beginning of Cycle 3 I still had several skills to cover before the term was over, so I sat down with the students and asked them, "How can we learn these skills but at the same time find a real purpose and audience for our work".

I wanted to cover some desktop publishing features in Word, like: columns, section breaks, shading/borders, etc.. In the past the students have created a newsletter - but for no real audience. The students like the idea of creating a REAL newspaper that would be read by REAL students. The students chose to make a newspaper about our school to give to incoming students. I ran the idea past our admissions counselor and she loved the idea.

The students decided on an 8 page layout: Welcome, Academics (2), Activities (2), Sports (2) and General Information. They broke into groups, wrote articles, edited the documents with "track changes", decided on a layout template, added the stories/images, proofread again and printed the final version for the admission counselor to review.

The best part of the whole project is that I was really a “guide on the side” during the process. The students decided what they thought new students needed to know. I observed quite a few students showing other students how to format the newspaper a particular way. The whole project was very successful and I think the students showed a lot of enthusiasm for the assignment because I gave them choice in demonstrating their technical skills.

Desktop Publishing

Goal: To create a one page poster to educate or influence student’s decisions or attitudes towards lunch nutrition, cost effectiveness, or reducing lunch waste.

Skills:Use 8 of the following desktop publishing features on your poster

• Page Border
• Word Art
• Auto Shapes
• Text Boxes
• Diagram / Organizational Chart
• Insert Clip Art & Edit Picture
• Line/Arrow options
• Shadow
• 3-D
• Font Effects
• Fill Color / Effects
• Align / Rotate / Flip

Message:
Look at your Lunch data. Pick one area that you feel that you could educate or influence others. For example, make a poster encouraging students to make healthy food choices, or suggest bringing a lunch from home to reduce lunch waste.

Observation:

• I created a one-page reference page that showed students how to customize each of the skills listed above.
• Students used the reference page often to learn make the poster.
• There was a lot of interaction between the students about how they were customizing the features for their poster.
  
• All 18 students completed the activity.
• The posters were hung up around the school.