Background Information:

 
I teach two classes of Journalism One at Lake Park High School and work on technology staff development the rest of my day. This semester I also have a journalism independent study student, Brandon. This student is the news editor for the school paper, which I advise. I would like Brandon to do more that just work on the newspaper during class. Since he is interested in pursuing a career in journalism and is applying to journalism colleges, I would like to showcase his work.

I have used traditional portfolios in my other English classes, with success. I would like to create a web portfolio project for my students. This will give my student's work a broader audience and teach them valuable skills. Next semester I will have Journalism Two students. I would like to use the web portfolio project I develop this semester  for those students. I would also like to offer this project to other teachers at my school who have independent study students.

    Perfect using  the "save as html" feature in Office 2000. Once I have mastered this delicate (and frustrating) task my students will be able to easily publish their work though Word.

    Create a web portfolio template.

    Research the best way to evaluate my student's portfolios (in progress and as a finished result.)

    Learn how to digitize audio. My independent study student is especially interested in radio broadcast. I need to discover how to incorporate audio that he creates into the web page without overwhelming our computer resources or loosing too much sound quality.

    Learn how to digitize video. One of our final class projects in Journalism class is to write/perform  a newscast that is produced by the TV production class. This is done during a one day in-school field trip.  I would like my students to create short video files. This would allow my students to tape segments ahead of time and use them in their newscast as special pieces "on-location" in the cafeteria, basketball game, etc.

Capture the design of the newspaper for the web. We spend many hours designing the newspaper, but that effort always seems lost on the Internet. I would like the original page design to be visible through images. I can either save our files as pdf files or take a photo of the newspaper!

Link to our newly designed newspaper page. I am working with a different student to redesign our newspaper web page. Combining these projects will showcase the newspaper and the individual efforts of the students.

Writing Samples:    A news article from each issue of the newspaper. (There will be five issues this semester).
                                Two editorials.
                                In-depth articles with appropriate sidebars.

Page Design:           Snapshots of each page designed by the student.
Audio:                    Short broadcasts of material written by student.
Movie:                    "On-location" newscasts to be used in the newscast field trip.

Microsoft Word 2000                  FTP software                                                           Digital Camera
Page Maker 6.5                            Quick Time                                                               Video Camera
Adobe Acrobat                            Video compression software

Concerns:

I am having trouble finding examples of high school student writing portfolios. I am finding many college sites and many art/photo/design/architecture portfolio pages. I will keep looking; there must be some out there. Once I locate them I would like to start a high school writing portfolio page as a resource of examples for educators and students.

Brandon is very tech savvy so he probably won't be overwhelmed by this. I'd like to make this as simple as possible so students who are not as computer literate can successfully work on this project next semester.

Technology itself is a concern! My district just changed all of its computer systems and the student files keep disappearing. Brandon will be working on the teacher computer in the classroom which doesn't have all of the software he will need (such as Page Maker to create his news pages). All web pages on the district server are controlled by the Tech Director, so I will need to use the U of I site to launch these portfolios myself. I will either need to sneak an ftp program on to the computer (they aren't allowed) or ftp everything from home.

Return to my ePortfolio