Published Work
“Adventurous Thinking”
Drawing from the work of high school teachers across the country, Adventurous Thinking illustrates how advocating for students' rights to read and write can be revolutionary work. Ours is a conflicted time: the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements, for instance, run parallel with increasingly hostile attitudes toward immigrants and prescriptive K-12 curricula, including calls to censor texts. Teachers who fight to give their students the tools and opportunities to read about and write on topics of their choice and express ideas that may be controversial are, in editor Mollie V. Blackburn's words, "revolutionary artists, and their teaching is revolutionary art."
The teacher chapters focus on high school English language arts classes that engaged with topics such as immigration, linguistic diversity, religious diversity, the #BlackLivesMatter movement, interrogating privilege, LGBTQ people, and people with physical disabilities and mental illness. Following these accounts is an interview with Angie Thomas, author of The Hate U Give, and an essay by Millie Davis, former director of NCTE's Intellectual Freedom Center. The closing essay reflects on provocative curriculum and pedagogy, criticality, community, and connections, as they get taken up in the book and might get taken up in the classrooms of readers.
The book is grounded in foundational principles from NCTE's position statements The Students' Right to Read and NCTE Beliefs about the Students' Right to Write that underlie these contributors' practices, principles that add up to one committed declaration: Literacy is every student's right.
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I wrote the first chapter of the book, “Journalism as a Way to Foster Students’ Rights to Read and Write about Immigration.”
In the introduction to the book, Mollie Blackburn explains my work: “I start with Tracy Anderson’s chapter on immigration, mostly because families striving to migrate to the United States during the years when this book was being written were suffering terribly due in part but not entirely to federal policies and practices. Revolutionary teachers are some of the people who can be a part of alleviating this suffering. Anderson shares her experiences teaching two journalism students as they wrote about the experiences of migrants to the United States and the devastating consequences of anti-immigration policies and practices on their lives, but also about the potential of student journalists to interrupt such consequences.”
“Purposeful Writing”
(My former name was Tracy Rosewarne.)
The strains on high school writing classrooms are endless—externally imposed curriculum requirements, ever—increasing expectations, high-stakes accountability assessments, and looming pressures for studying genres ranging from college-entrance essays to workplace English. Purposeful Writing can help you make sense of these competing demands and create an instructional framework that’s flexible enough to help every student in the classroom but strong enough to stand up to the weight of standards and whole-class needs. Writing workshop is that framework.
Rebecca Bowers Sipe and Tracy Rosewarne take you inside a diverse, urban high school to find out how purposeful writing instruction looks, feels, and sounds. They show how the complexity of secondary writing instruction can be tackled by adapting the popular and successful writing workshop model to fit the needs of high school teachers and learners. More specifically, they show you how the workshop creates conditions where genres can be explored for authentic purposes and where individual, collaborative, and teacher-learner relationships can help every student increase their facility with many different types of writing.
In Purposeful Writing you’ll find: specific strategies for building community in the writing classroom, promoting student engagement, and matching students’ interests and purposes to genres and curriculum; day-by-day descriptions detailing two representative nonfiction units—complete with full lesson plans—that move students from "I hate writing essays" to a vision of nonfiction writing as absorbing, challenging, and interesting; notes and techniques for numerous teaching tasks such as assessment, evaluation, and conferencing; ideas, suggestions, and tools to support developing workshop environments for high school classrooms, including writing invitations, skill and craft lessons, and rubrics.
If you’re looking for a way to balance the many complex demands made on your writing instruction, read Purposeful Writing. You’ll discover how to create compelling lessons, teach them in a setting that encourages students to be personally invested in their own learning, and, best of all, have the flexibility to meet the needs of every writer in your classroom.
“They Still Can’t Spell?”
Rebecca Sipe, together with Jennifer, Dawn, Tracy, and Karen—incredible teachers, all—provide an encouraging, supportive, practical, and downright inspiring resource. . . . Educators will recognize their own struggles with spelling instruction as they become aware of how motivating and perhaps enjoyable spelling can be--while seeing with new insight through the eyes of adolescents for whom "spelling is not trivial."
—Shane Templeton, Ph.D., Foundation Professor of Curriculum and Instruction, U of Nevada, Reno
Challenged spellers in middle and high school are hit with a triple whammy—they can't spell, traditional strategies don't help them, and poor spelling often inhibits their writing. English teachers face a challenge, too—especially those whose job is not to teach spelling. This book changes that. It offers teachers ways to identify students' problems within the context of writing and the appropriate strategies to correct them in regular English classrooms.
The book is the result of the four-year collaboration of former secondary teacher Rebecca Bowers Sipe, two middle and two high school teachers, and their students. Based on literacy histories, placement inventories, visual memory tests, and analyses of student writing, their book: offers a detailed look at the literacy journeys of challenged spellers through student work, vignettes, and interviews; describes four categories of challenged spellers and their relationship with overall literacy investment; identifies the pitfalls of "too little, too shallow, too fast" practices, including familiar but ineffective lists and tests; expands basic spelling knowledge within the constraints of the regular English curriculum; steps inside the classrooms of these teacher-researchers as they put their strategies into practice; includes tools, resources, and other materials for immediate use in teaching.
In addition, the book provides ideas and cautions for addressing spelling at the classroom, school, and district levels, plus step-by-step plans for supporting departmental- and school-based discussions about spelling instruction.
Learning to Love the Questions
Learning to Love the Questions: Professional Growth and Perspective Transformations
Rebecca Bowers Sipe and Tracy Rosewarne
For Rebecca Bowers Sipe and Tracy Rosewarne, collaboration proved to be the key to effective professional development. Working together and evaluating the effectiveness of a writing workshop in the high school classroom helped them achieve insights about their beliefs and practices.
“Supporting Challenged Spellers”
Introduction to our article:
We’ve all worked with challenged spellers. Some of us are challenged spellers. In each case, one thing is certain: Difficulties with spelling can be frustrating and embarrassing, potentially causing those who struggle to avoid tasks that lead to these feelings - tasks like writing…
We were drawn together by a common question: How can we help our students grow in competence and confidence as writers as we address their spelling difficulties? To help us understand their spelling dilemmas, we invited challenged spellers from our classrooms to work with us in a research project. Over a three-year period, we have studied instructional histories, analyzed results of spelling and visual memory inventories, and mapped the strategies and habits our challenged spellers used as well as those they lacked. What we found has profoundly altered our approach to spelling by allowing us to be more strategic in our teaching.
A note about this edition…
The idea for this special edition of the Bear River Review, Bear River Writers Respond to War, was born during the June 2006 Bear River Writers‘ Conference when Tracy Rosewarne first read aloud her poem, ―To Steven, from Fallujah.‖ The poem triggered the suggestion from the BR inaugural review‘s featured writer, Anne-Marie Oomen, to do this issue, and we are grateful to her for the idea. We are also fortunate to have had powerful works submitted to us by a number of faculty and attendees. Their honesty and vision allow us to experience war-time events through new eyes, taking us places we have never been. We thank you - writer, reader, visitor—for being part of this important issue.
~Chris Lord, Editor
Knight Lab StoryMaps Opens Up New Possibilities — Here’s What One Student Did To Make Sense of Covid Data
Published on JEA Digital Media, by Tracy Anderson and Tai Tworek
In the upcoming months when our school coverage will be anything but typical, Knight Lab StoryMaps will give our students the ability to tell powerful stories and engage their community. Our students will be able to research and collect data in new ways that they haven’t always had time to focus on in the past. Our stories this year will be different, and StoryMaps will help students find another way to share their work.
When one of my students, Tai Tworek, grappled with how to make sense of Covid-19 and race, Knight Lab StoryMaps gave her the tools that she needed to create an interactive infographic, Covid Cases By Zip Code. Tworek told the story about the undeniable link between zip codes, race and health disparities in our community.
Tworek explains her process: When news surrounding the racial health disparities in Covid-19 cases started to surface, I wanted to see if the national trend was upheld within my own community. In Washtenaw County, two zip codes have a larger population of people of color than the others. This previous school year, I had written an opinion piece about the health disparities among African American residents in my county, and I noticed that many of our community’s health problems were related to race. By presenting the data through Northwestern University’s Knight Lab StoryMaps, the connections between Covid-19 cases and race became apparent.
I was able to use data that was updated every day from the Washtenaw County Health Department with racial demographics per zip code from the U.S. Census Bureau. I organized the StoryMaps by zip code, as exemplified by the health department. On each individual slide per zip code, I highlighted the number of reported cases as of a specified date, along with the suspected cases; I also included the percentages of that zip codes population who identified as Black or African American. On each slide, the StoryMaps allowed me to drop a pin on the zipcode to show where in Washtenaw County it is located. StoryMaps allowed me to show a trend consistent with that of national data: areas with a higher proportion of Black or African American residents reported higher cases of Covid-19.
Link to Tai’s StoryMap (Also above)
How To Create A StoryMap [Video Tutorial]
Published on JEA Digital Media, by Tracy Anderson and Tai Tworek
The Knight Lab by Northwestern University is an online resource page for different displays of digital storytelling. The lab has developed multiple platforms, one of which includes the StoryMaps feature. This feature allows users to pick multiple locations and map them together to visually tell a story. It can be paired with short paragraphs of text. This video will be a how-to guide to using StoryMaps.
Mike Tirico Has Advice for Student Journalists
Published on JEA Digital Media
Mike Tirico loves talking about interviewing. I’ve interviewed him a handful of times, and this time it’s recorded (thank you Zoom). What I love about talking to Tirico is that he openly shares his best practices with students and gives students skills they can immediately use in their reporting.
As Tirico figures it, 65% of his life has been telling stories and interviewing folks. “I love it every day,” he said. “The job still wakes me up with a great passion to learn and get better at it.” Tirico has emphasized this in every interview I have done with him: he is always trying to learn more and to get better. In the past, when a room full of student journalists hear him talk about this, they realize in that moment that there isn’t an apex where you are trying to get to as a journalist. Journalism is a continuous — and powerful — process of learning and improving.
Tirico grew up in New York City, and he knew from a young age that he wanted to be a sports broadcaster. His journey as a journalist started at Syracuse and went on to include working at
ESPN, ABC and NBC. In short, he’s covered football, basketball, golf, tennis, hockey and world cup soccer. He is currently the lead primetime host of the Olympics on NBC and lead play-by-play for Notre Dame Football on NBC.
Tirico’s resume is impressive.
What is even more impressive is that he cares about our student journalists, and he knows that our students are journalism’s future.
Tirico believes that “Who, What, Where, When, Why and How” still matter; they are at the core of all that we do as journalists. But there is more than these fundamental questions.
In this interview, Tirico created a new acronym on the spot: PLC. Tirico explained that being a journalist is all about preparation, listening and curiosity. Tirico has explained to me before how he uses stacks and stacks of notecards to record information about the athletes he covers; he is always striving to know more about who they are as people, which is why he is so good as a reporter.
“Try to triangulate the person,” Tirico said. “Can you tell me something about the person? What makes them a person, not just a line on the roster?” Instead of just knowing that someone on the football team is a certain number, height, weight, from this town, etc., he finds out what they are studying. What do they want to do after college? He wants to be able to talk about them as more than just the athlete on the field.
His advice is not just for sports; it applies to features as well. He encourages students to think about the people whom they are interviewing.
“What makes so and so tick? Do they like coffee? Do they like tea? There’s always something unique about each person,” Tirico said. “When you can dig long enough and deep enough to find that, it’s rewarding to us as journalists and hopefully it makes our viewers, listeners, readers more excited about what we are going to do next.”
In addition, Tirico emphasizes that the most important trait in an interview is being a great listener.
“If I am doing a long interview, I come with the first question and the third question, but I hope that my second question comes off the first answer,” Tirico said. “It forces me to be in the mode of listening.” When his second question comes off the first answer, the person being interviewed knows that they are being listened to. This approach makes all of the difference for everything that follows in the interview.
The third part of his acronym is curiosity. “If you are curious about anything then you can be someone who can interview anyone on any topic and make it appealing to the person who really cares,” Tirico said. “If you can find what’s going to be a magnet to someone who has an interest in this sport, then [you] can have a better interview. So, I need to have a little curiosity created even if it’s not there naturally.”
On television, Tirico makes interviewing look easy. But, after the interviews are done, Tirico replays interviews in his head and can see places where he wishes he would have asked a different question or asked a question in a different way. He is always reflecting on his work, and he is always learning.
“The great thing about interviewing is that it is such an inexact science,” Tirico said. He reminds us though that the more you interview, the more comfortable you feel and the better you get.
In Tirico’s direct address to young journalists he offers encouragement. “You sign up to cover history as it is happening,” Tirico said. “Do not get pushed off the trail. The world will always need journalists to document what is going on. There’s never been a more important time for journalists, and there’s never been a better time for journalists.”
Getting your students to hear how podcasts are built…and giving them a place to start their own
Published on JEA Digital Media, by Tracy Anderson, Jennifer Guerra and Rachel Ishikawa
It’s hard to start a student podcast. We are hoping this makes it a little easier.
Our hope is that student publications across the country will take on issues like race, fear, phones, identity, etc., in their own communities. Maybe these topics can be starting places for your students. Or, maybe these lead your kids in some new directions that are most relevant in their communities. Or, maybe your kids want to do something totally different. All of it is good. It’s about the voices, the stories and the connections.
The questions below are content related and they are focused on opening up conversations. But, if your goal is to have your students create podcasts, we’d also recommend having them listen to the podcast and take it apart so they can see how it was built. Have students make observations about the writing and articulate how it is different than print writing; identify the ‘value proposition’ for each episode, which lets listeners know what the episode is about; identify the focus of each story, and talk about why it’s important; talk about the background sounds (ambi) you hear; discuss how music is used throughout the episode, and/or what role does music play in the episode; talk about how quotes (tape) are used in the podcast.
KTD Episode 1: Race
Release date: 06/17/2020
This Week’s Show: Race
In this episode (summary): Three weeks after police killed George Floyd, teens have been out on the streets to protest police brutality and systemic racism. And for a lot of us, especially for Black teens, this is a resounding cry fighting for our right to live and to live in peace. Some people may wonder: why? What is motivating teens to step out, to speak up, and to demand change? To try and answer that, we move out of the streets and into the home for a moment and ask: What kinds of conversations are teens having with their families about race right now?
Suggested discussion prompts:
-What conversations are you having with your family about race?
-What differences do you notice among the conversations? What similarities?
-What do you think about the narrator putting herself in the story?
-There’s a lot of debate over “objectivity” in journalism. What role do you think journalists should play, particularly when it comes to issues of race in America?
Link(s):
Apple Podcasts link:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/race/id1514884296?i=1000478320196
Michigan Radio buildout: https://www.michiganradio.org/post/kids-these-days-what-conversations-are-you-having-your-family-about-race
KTD Episode 2: Fear
Release date: 06/24/2020
This Week’s Show: Fear
In this episode (summary): We’ve grown up in an age of fear — from school shooters, to the climate crisis, to COVID-19. In this episode, we look at how that has shaped our lives.
Suggested discussion prompts:
-Do you agree with the premise that Generation Z has grown in an “age of fear”? Explain.
-What are the lockdown drills like at your school, and how do you feel about them?
-Climate change and COVID-19 share a push-and-pull between individual freedoms (to wear or not wear a mask; to drive or not drive a Hummer) and shared responsibility (flatten the curve; stop global warming). What are some other examples of individualism vs collectivism?
Link(s):
Apple Podcasts link:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fear/id1514884296?i=1000479410907
Michigan Radio buildout: https://www.michiganradio.org/post/kids-these-days-how-has-fear-shaped-our-lives
KTD Episode 6: Phones
Release date: 07/22/2020
This Week’s Show: Phones
In this episode (summary): We use our phones all the time, but we never talk about how we use them. This episode, we look at the unspoken rules and expectations of social media, and how they can impact our relationships.
Suggested discussion prompts:
-How does location tracking, and other types of surveillance affect your behavior?
-Several people wouldn’t agree to tape an interview for this episode (Lana’s boyfriend; parents). As a journalist, you’ll come across people who do not want to talk to you. How do you deal with that, and what kinds of workarounds might you use?
-What is the difference between “off the record” and “on background”?
– When is it ethically ok to grant anonymity to a source?
Link(s):
Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/phones/id1514884296?i=1000485704519
Michigan Radio buildout:
https://www.michiganradio.org/post/kids-these-days-lets-talk-about-teens-and-phones
Join JEA Digital Media’s Tracy Anderson and Two Radio Professionals Sept. 28 to Talk About How You Can Make a Difference In Your Community with Podcasts
Published on JEA Digital Media
Without a doubt, now is the time to explore podcasts. Advisers and students are invited for a live event with Jennifer Guerra, Peabody Award-winning producer, and Rachel Ishikawa, producer of Kids These Days.
Rachel and Jen will share experiences from their years of professional work and expertise. They will share tips for how to create podcasts that can make a difference in your communities. They will talk about interviewing (in-person and remote), story structure, equipment, and more. There will be time for Q&A, so come with your questions!
All you need to do to access the event live is sign up here. This is so we don’t post a Zoom link publicly and get unwanted visitors. If you fill out the form, we will get you added to the list and send you the zoom link around 5 p.m. ETD on Sept. 28.
They have experience creating a podcast during the pandemic, and you can more information about that here. There will be a follow-up event on Sept. 30 geared towards parents and educators.
As Executive Producer, Jennifer and her Michigan Radio team received the Peabody Award for their 2018 podcast, Believed, sharing the stories of survivors of disgraced Olympic doctor and sexual predator Larry Nassar. Jen and Rachel’s most recent project Kids These Days was created in collaboration with Community High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Article about our project: https://current.org/2020/07/student-produced-podcast-from-michigan-radio-aims-to-provide-nuanced-perspectives-on-generation-z/
Issues & Ale on Sept. 30 talking with experts about teen issues: https://www.michiganradio.org/post/issues-ale-home-kids-these-days-1
Jen’s podcast Believed: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510326/believed
Kids These Days: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/867450285/kids-these-days
Jennifer’s bio:
Jennifer Guerra is the Executive Producer of Special Projects at Michigan Radio. She develops new podcasts for the station, most recently Kids These Days, a youth-led podcast with students from Community High School in Ann Arbor. She was also the Executive Producer of Michigan Radio’s Peabody award-winning podcast Believed. Jennifer was a 2018 Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan, and has been with Michigan Radio since 2005, where she started as an on-air host and arts reporter. She covered poverty and education in metro Detroit for five years as part of the station’s State of Opportunity team. The Detroit chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists named her “Young Journalist of the Year” in 2008, and her stories have been featured on NPR, Marketplace and Studio 360. Jennifer got her start in radio as a producer at WFUV in the Bronx.
Rachel’s bio:
Rachel Ishikawa joined Michigan Radio in 2020 as a podcast producer. She produced Kids These Days, a youth-led podcast with students from Community High School in Ann Arbor.
Prior to Michigan Radio, Rachel spent the past three years producing audio in Philadelphia. In addition to her work on NPR Music and WXPN’s The Gospel Roots of Rock and Soul, she was the Social Practice Lab Artist-in-Residence at Asian Arts Initiative. There she collaborated with young people to develop an online audio sequencer that sampled sounds from the rapidly redeveloping Chinatown North Neighborhood. She’s produced shows like the Opt-in and the Healing Justice Podcast, and her radio features range from topics of skin stigmas to bioacoustics.
For more information about the event, feel free to email me.
What creating a podcast during the shutdown taught me
CHS students Leah Dewey and Jordan De Padova, along with Michigan Radio producer Rachel Ishikawa, interview youth at a teen-led Black Lives Matter protest. (Emma Winowiecki – Michigan Radio)
Published on JEA Digital Media
On March 11, rumors started flying that school was going to close by the end of the week. One of my classes had been planning a podcast in collaboration with Michigan Radio all year, and our plan was to start recording on Friday, March 13. I grew up watching “Friday the 13th” movies, so I should have known better than to ever plan anything on that date.
We had the name of our podcast, our logo, our tagline, and the episode topics, but we had no — as in zero — interviews recorded. We quickly found a supply closet and a teacher’s office (I work in an old school with no recording studio) where we would record as many interviews as we could before the closure. We spent three days in high-speed mode doing interviews. March 13 was indeed our last day, yet it was also just the beginning of our recording process. Our podcast had a drop deadline of May 20. It was a real deadline.
We actually got it done, but getting there took some doing. I’ve always believed in the power of journalism, but during the pandemic it became more; it was a lifeline that kept us all engaged and moving forward. Where some of my other classes were built on individual assignments and papers, our podcast class had a clear, collective purpose and a deadline. We were making something, and students stepped up to work overtime. As unideal as it sounds, creating a podcast during this time was, unexpectedly, exactly what we needed.
We had three recording kit bags that I would drive to and from my students. We had a routine: students would leave the kits outside, I would pick them up, clean them in my “sanitizing station” in the back of my car and bring them to the next student. I’ve never known where all of my students lived before, and driving around to their homes and waving, talking, smiling, and missing them from afar gave us much-needed, real-life contact. When I first took my advising job, the former adviser, who retired after 35 years of teaching, told me that he always did home visits to every single student, every single semester. Twenty-four years later, in the midst of the pandemic, I finally understood why he did them.
When I think back to past podcasts that my students have done, I realize that I was missing a teaching opportunity. I didn’t have the expertise nor the tools that I needed to guide them. There were critical pieces that were missing: planning, reporting, storytelling, writing, revision and editing. They were missing because I didn’t know how to teach them, and sometimes I didn’t even know that all of those pieces were an essential part of podcasting.
As I am planning for next year, podcasting is definitely part of it. I know that without this podcast experience working with Jennifer Guerra and Rachel Ishikawa, I wouldn’t have an idea about where to start. Jennifer was the Executive Producer of Michigan Radio’s Peabody Award-winning podcast, Believed, and a 2018 Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan. Rachel helped produce WXPN and NPR Music’s award-winning The Gospel Roots of Soul in 2018-2019, and worked closely with youth in Philadelphia as the Social Practice Lab Artist-in-Residence at Asian Arts Initiative from 2016-2017. The two collaborated with us for the year, and I had the chance to learn alongside my students.
Jen and Rachel’s advice can give all of us the solid foundation that we need to get our students started with creating and building their own podcasts. We are sharing some key info with you: Tips on Audio Storytelling, Reporting Kits and discussion questions to get your students thinking about podcasts and engaging with issues.
At a time when we are missing human contact and hearing each other’s voices, podcasts can connect us. It’s the right time to dive in.
Tips on Audio Storytelling
CHS students Leah Dewey and Tai Tworek, and Michigan Radio producer Rachel Ishikaw, interview youth at a teen-led Black Lives Matter protest. (Emma Winowiecki – Michigan Radio)
Published on JEA Digital Media, by Tracy Anderson, Jennifer Guerra and Rachel Ishikawa
Pick a Treatment
Figuring out how you want to tell your story early on is crucial because it can determine what kind of tape you need. The ways you can tell an audio story are limitless, but here are some tried and true treatments for audio storytelling:
Acts and Trax – This is your standard radio feature. It includes “acts” (your tape) and tracks (your narration).
Non-narrated – This kind of story has zero narration from the reporter, which means you need a lot of descriptive tape that can clearly lay out a story. Pursuing a non-narrated audio story means that you will need to work closely with the people you’re interviewing to get clear, descriptive tape. You may often need to ask them to restate sentences to be more clear.
Two-way – Just a straightforward interview between the reporter and their interviewee(s). Think Fresh Air.
Audio Diary – The reporter records the ins and outs of their life. This includes reflections, interviews, ambient sounds of their environment, and active scenes.
Audio Essay – An audio essay isn’t like your typical personal essay or oped for print. The essay needs to sound like how the speaker talks. Audio essays are a great opportunity to play around with sound design.
Collect sounds, not only interviews
People often say that radio is a very visual medium. You want people to really “see” your story by recording ambient noise: dogs barking, doors slamming, the radio being turned on, the sound of the blender. Use the microphone the same way you would a movie camera: get close up, medium, and wide shots.
Depending on the story’s treatment, you may also want to create active scenes in your piece. Doing a story about the pressures of being a young athlete? Take us to a basketball game!
Writing for radio
Radio is as much about writing as it is about recording superb audio. Writing a script or essay for radio is pretty different from writing for print. Here are some key considerations when writing for radio:
Shorter sentences are better.
Write as you speak.
Keep language simple.
When you’re writing your script, say it out loud!
Set the scene – Tell us where you are, who you’re talking to, what’s happening. Be the listener’s eyes and ears.
Beyond Snaps: How High School Journalists Can Use Snapchat as a Tool to Improve Reporting
Published on JEA Digital Media, by Tracy Anderson and Hannah Freeland
I’ve never seen the value of Snapchat in my journalism classroom…until now. I’ve always thought of Snapchat as a selfie-indulgent platform. However, in one short class period at the beginning of January, I realized — with help from my students — that it can be a valuable tool for students to use for research, seeing life around the world on micro levels, for generating story ideas and connecting with sources.
So, before you write it off completely, consider how you can bring it into your classroom to help cover everything from the basketball game in your school’s gym on a Friday night to Coronavirus halfway around the world.
To see some of what I learned and get some ideas, click on this link.