Action Plan: Collaborating on a Newspaper Front Page

Kids have been making class newspapers since time began, or at least for as long as organizing schooling has been a thing. Its authenticity, real-world connections and intimate association with technology, communication studies and global awareness make it an activity that is well suited to 21st century learning.  I’ve been doing a unit on journalism with my Grade 9 English class for five years now, and I’m constantly on the lookout for technology I can use to make the experience more truly collaborative.

In brief, for this unit students are divided into groups of four or five. Each student is responsible for writing one news article for the front page. They are also assigned jobs: advertising editor, copy editor, layout editor, picture editor. Last year we used Word to create tabloid-sized full-colour front pages (which sometimes grew to two or three pages) of imaginary newspapers (the students designed their own mastheads); the plan was that I would get these printed as posters at Staples. Unfortunately, I didn’t do my own homework, and all our newspapers were in a size and format that Staples couldn’t print. I would have had to resize every item in every document by hand, and there wasn’t enough time left in the year to do that.

But you live and learn. Now that we’ve solved the sizing problem, my aim for the project this year is to find the most effective technology for enabling the students in each group to work on their front pages collaboratively and simultaneously. Last year, there was a lot of committee-type decision making followed by one person entering the changes while the others sat and watched. This year, I want to see them collaborating within the document as well as about the document.

Google.docs immediately springs to mind. However, many of the girls in my grade 9 class are not old enough to have a gmail account, and we also have some privacy concerns. Googleapps for education would be perfect, but my school doesn’t yet have an account there, although there is a chance we may have one up and running by the time I start this unit. Emaze is another possibility: it has a newspaper template which might fit the bill, although so far I’ve found the program a bit unwieldy and not very intuitive. (I like prezi much more, but you have to pay for it now!) I’m not sure yet if I could print Emaze presentation in poster format, which is the final form we want the project to take.

Together my students and I will keep searching for the perfect solution!