Done!

We're done with our project on the National High School Journalism Competition! I am very excited to be done because I feel like I have accomplished a lot during this project and have helped RJI immensely when they plan the actual competition this summer. I am very proud of all of my research and leadership skills this past semester. I am proud of how I handled them and how the successful the final product ultimately was.

We had our final presentation today and I think it went really well and the professors were really impressed with all of our research. They were especially excited with the trial run, which really was my thing throughout the semester that I really took ownership of. I am so proud of the whole project and am glad it came to a close so successfully.

I cannot believe that it was just two years ago that I took my first convergence fundamentals class. I am now leaving the journalism school to pursue a reporting career in New York City. I am so excited! It's been a great couple of years and I am excited to start my career.

Finishing Up

This past week I started working on the final paper/presentation and I still haven't gotten the final products from Medina's class yet, but I expect to get them sometime today. Hopefully.

I wrote the final survey, which Medina's class took because as I understand it they have finished this project. Medina had what we thought was a genius idea to have each group create a Google website to post their stories on. That part of the project, which was not our idea at all, seems to have backfired because it was very challenging for the students to do and caused a lot of problems. So, Medina called me on Tuesday and asked if he could get me the projects by Wednesday, which I said was okay. However, I still haven't received the final projects, but hopefully I'll get them by this afternoon. I'm not too worried about it.

I've written most of my section of the project, which is the trial run, since that has been what I have contributed my heart and soul to during this competition. I have worked very hard this whole semester on all the components on this project, but the trial run was definitely the part of the semester I am most proud of. It was my idea and I put it all together.

I'm looking forward to presenting our research to the faculty next week and seeing what they think of our findings. I can't believe that I'm graduating in a week's time and that my student career is over. At least for now. I am off to bigger and better things, I suppose.

Here is a link to my website: hayleykaplan.weebly.com. Thanks for reading. And thanks for a great journalism education.

Trial Run, Week 3

Our trial run is nearly over! It would have been over today, but Medina's class was so stressed by the deadline that I told him his students could have until this Tuesday to finish up their projects. Medina was very hesitant to extend the deadline, but I think some groups really needed it. I think he's really trying to enforce deadline responsibility onto his students, which is good.

I actually heard from my groups a little bit more this past week, which was good. The one thing about this trial run has been that the college mentoring has not worked as well as I'd hoped, but I did hear from my groups this week and was able to advise them, so I hope that helped them.

I'm working on putting together the final survey this weekend, so the students can take the exit survey early next week. I'm also going to arrange an exit interview with Medina to clear up a couple of questions I have for the final paper/presentation, which we have already started preparing for.

So, I think everything is coming together nicely. We're just tying up a few loose ends at this point and hopefully the trial run will be complete by early next week.

Trial Run, Week 2

Our trial run is in its second week and its going pretty well I think despite some roadblocks. We've really been focused on this trial run in these last few weeks of the semester. The Hickman High School trial run didn't work out just because we ran out of time and didn't think we would have enough resources to supply to their students, so this is the last big thing we're doing for our research.

I've been communicating a lot with Mr. Medina, the high school teacher in New York and he's been the one who's been really excited about this trial run. We got the second round of weekly reports from the groups who according to Medina are working very hard to meet their tight deadline next Friday, when the trial run officially ends. Some of the students have also took the mid-term survey.

The main problem we're having with the trial run is that despite all the e-mails we've sent out to our individual groups none of them have responded to us. In the survey, the students said that they didn't hear from their college mentors (i.e. us), which is so weird since we've all e-mailed them at least once. So the college mentoring isn't going as well as we'd hoped, but everything else seems to be going fine. It'll be interesting to see the actual stories that are produced next week. They had three weeks to produce two multimedia elements, so we'll see what they come up with. I'm looking forward to it!

Trial Run!

Our trial run has finally begun! We are so excited about it and I am so happy it has finally started! Mr. Medina's class in Endicott, New York has been divided into six groups and each of us has taken on two groups and are communicating with them regularly.

I started the week by having a long conversation with Mr. Medina and making sure we were all on the same page about the three week trial run and we were all on the same page. He had his class take our introductory survey, e-mailed me the names and e-mail addresses of his group members who have already picked stories to report on for the three-week period of time, and we have each taken on two groups and have started communicating with them.

I'm excited that we seem to be off to a good start here. Mr. Medina seems excited about the trial run, despite all the things we have to have him do for us and we're excited to have him participate. Hopefully his students are just as excited but we'll see as we continue to communicate with them.

The trial run/extended focus group with Hickman High School is coming along a little bit slower because we've been so focused on this trial run, but I have no doubt that the Hickman trial run will happen eventually too. We're very excited that we're making progress on this trial run and look forward to the results that it will eventually yield.

Prepping for Trial Runs

This week was all about preparing for our trial runs. Our trial run with Ed Medina's class in New York begins on Monday, so I worked on finalizing everything with him and making sure he and I were on the same page with everything and his students were all ready to start working on their stories on Monday. We are very excited that this is going to be starting on Monday and lasting three weeks. We put the final details on everything this past week and I feel like we are ready to go on Monday. We will monitor the class, which will be divided into groups, thoroughly and receive weekly updates from them and Mr. Medina and survey them weekly, so we have many ways to monitor their progress. We are very excited to get this trial run started!

We also worked this week on getting the trial run/extended focus group started with Kim Pettlon's class at Hickman. We want to make the trial run with her class more technology based and see how into the technology her class is and how much they take away from it. We had a very in depth discussion on what we want to do with her class and a lot of it will just depend on what technology her class has available, which we are unsure of. So we have a few more things to find out from her, but after that we want to get the trial run with her class going soon.

I think we're in a really good place right now. These two trial runs are the final stages of our research and I have every reason to believe they will go very smoothly, although Kim Pettlon's class will take a lot of work to plan since Mr. Medina's class trial run has been planned out for a while now.

Trial Run

This week, we really focused on getting our trial run plan up and running for Mr. Medina in New York to review. We also had to get our presentation for Monday done, so we did that first and then concentrated on forming the specifics of our trial run. We kind of knew what they would be from the beginning because we wanted the trial run to be a miniature version of the actual competition, we just needed to put it on paper. So, I spent most of Monday doing just that and formulating a plan of how we were going to actually monitor the progress of the trial run for our research. I think we have a pretty good plan.

Kate focused on working on the first survey, which Mr. Medina will give to the students before the competition begins. We are going to survey the students before, during and after the trial run and also have them do informal weekly check-ins as the trial run progresses. So those are our two main ways of monitoring the progress of the trial run. We haven't heard back from Mr. Median about what we thinks of the trial run, but we've been keeping in close contact with him so far about the trial run, so communication with him has definitely not been a problem.

Because of the way his school's Spring Break works out the trial run will begin April 12 and last three weeks, so it's perfect timing for us because it'll end right a week before finals week. That will be enough time to review all of our research from the trial run and their final products they'll be turning into us. I'm very excited about this! I've spent a lot of time putting this whole thing together and I'm excited to see it materialize. We'll also be working on getting a different type of trial run going with Kim Pettlon's class at Hickman High School going after Spring Break is over. Until then, have a good break everyone!

Another Focus Group

This week, we focused on getting our trial run off the ground and doing another focus group with Hickman High School. Edward Medina is very excited about our trial run and we want to get him our plan by next week at the very latest before we go on Spring Break, so we have some work to do before then. Ryan met with Mike and got some ideas from him on how we should progress with the trial run, so I think we should be in good shape to get this off the ground by next week. Mr. Medina is even going to weave the trial run into his class curriculum, which is great and very generous of him, so hopefully he'll be excited with our plan once we get it to him.

We also went to Hickman High School on Thursday morning to do our second focus group with high school students. This focus group went much better than Rock Bridge's, mainly because the classes we went to were smaller and the students were more focused, which is saying something, since we saw them first thing in the morning. They had some good suggestions about the competition and eased some of our worries about the competition. They thought that high schoolers would like to stick with a topic for an extended period of time and would not get bored and that we should have a list of suggested topics for them to chose from. They said some other things that we will discuss in our presentation on Monday, but if was very helpful.

Kim Pettlon, Hickman's journalism teacher, also offered up her class for a trial run as well, which was kind of a surprise, so she is another journalism teacher we may work with later this semester. So, everything is going well so far and we're working hard on our presentation for Monday.

Getting Things Done

The big thing we got accomplished this past week was that we went to Rock Bridge High School to conduct the first of the two focus groups with real high school journalism students! We had been trying for about two weeks to get in touch with Rock Bridge's journalism teacher, so I guess my persistence finally paid off because she finally got back to us and let us come into her classroom and talk to her students.

I think it went pretty well. Not as great as I would have wanted, but very well. We brought candy and some gift certificates provided by Mike, so those incentives were good in getting the students talking. We started by just introducing ourselves and having the students introduce themselves and saying why they like working on the newspaper. It may seem simple, but that was probably the most beneficial part of our time there. They said that they really like having ownership in a product that they produced themselves and the atmosphere of a different type of class during the day. They had other thoughts that we'll go into more during out presentation, but those were their general thoughts, which I thought were interesting.

Ryan also put together a Mad Libs, which was his idea, and we collected their responses at the end, so we have a list of the students' favorite media company and other information like that, which will be very helpful for our research. We kind of ran out of time towards the end, so that wasn't good, but I think both we and the students enjoyed us being there. They also asked us some questions about college and the J school at the end, so I think they enjoyed that.

I also got in contact with Hickman High School this week, so they said we can come there next week and do the same thing we did at Rock Bridge with their journalism students, so that's good! I'm very glad that both of these sessions are set up and getting down. They are very helpful!

In other news, I have finished my portion of phone interviews to the teachers who took our survey and Ryan and Kate are in the process of finishing their interviews up, so hopefully those will be done soon. We also hope to set something up with Edward Medina in New York who volunteered his journalism class to do a test run of the competition, so I think we'll tackle that after Spring Break. We also have to do another presentation for the class in about a week, so we have to start that soon. All's is going well so far and I hope we keep on that track. I'm the group leader and I'm really trying to be fair but also lead the group and the competition towards success!

Organization

Last week, I was in New York on a media tour with the Magazine Club, so I wasn't able to do much for our capstone project. So, we met on Tuesday to regroup and get a new game plan together. Yes, we've done that before, but this time we did a major refocus. The group decided that communication was our main issue, which I agree, so they appointed me as the group leader. They said they wanted one person in charge of communication, assigning tasks to other group members and meeting with Mike, our client in this case, on a weekly basis to make sure we're on the right track. So that is my new role in the group and I am extremely comfortable with it.

I continued to try and call and e-mail Rock Bridge this week with no success. After today, I'm officially giving up, so I'm going to try and call other high school journalism departments in the area and hopefully one of them will let us talk to their students about our contest. I really don't think we're asking all that much, so hopefully somebody will respond to us before Spring Break. Ryan has been trying to call Hickman High School, so hopefully he has been having more success. We're also trying to contact the student editors of each high school publication, so we'll see if we have any success there.

The three of us also split up calling up the five journalism teachers that did respond to the survey we sent out a few weeks ago. I called Edward Medina because I've been e-mailing back and forth with him for a few weeks now. He is an extremely nice man who had some good suggestions and was reassuring about some of the things we have already decided we want this competition to be. I hope Ryan and Kate have had equal success with their teachers. He also made me an extremely generous offer--he offered up his students to do a test run this semester of our competition. I think it is a great idea and something to think about doing maybe after Spring Break. If we don't get a response from these other high schools in the area then maybe it would be worth doing a conference call with his students to see what they would be interested in. His enthusiasm has made me more enthusiastic about the prospects of the contest.

So, I think we're finally going in the right direction. It's taken us a while to get here, we know that, and we will work hard to make up for the time lost. We have to work on our communication skills and making sure we're all on the same page between the three of us and the faculty, but I think me being the group leader is a good step and I think we're moving the right direction.

Moving Along

This week we focused on getting together our high school journalism focus groups together, which I'm not quite sure we were successful at. We tried to call the journalism teacher at Rock Bridge and she seems to be blowing us off, which is a little bit discouraging. However, I am still hopeful that we will meet with her students and Hickman's students and get the information we need for our focus groups.

In other news, a few of the teachers I e-mailed thank you e-mails to for taking our survey e-mailed me back. One in particular sent me a longer e-mail about some suggestions he had, so hopefully those will help us with our planning. I'm really hopeful that these two focus groups will happen within the next week or two, but this has already been a bit of a setback.

I think our presentation went well this past Monday and we're working hard to organize this competition for high schoolers.

Picking Up The Pace

This week was a bit reassuring as we got moving a little faster on planning the competition. We still only ended up with five responses to our survey that went out to high school journalism teachers, so that was a kind of discouraging, but we persevered. I think the problem we're encountering is that we really need a lot of guidance from the faculty for this project to be a success. We are just completely lost without their advice, and being independent students that is not something we are used to. So, we are putting that behind us and meeting with our professors as often as we deem necessary, starting this past week.

We met with Mike and Keith on Wednesday and they had numerous suggestions for immediate next steps in our research phase. I cannot believe that we hadn't thought of some of the things they suggested on our own, but we're appreciative for their advice. I started by e-mailing the teachers who did participate in our survey personal thank you e-mails. I'm hoping a few of them will respond back to me with further suggestions, but if they don't at least they know we're appreciative.

We're also going to conduct focus groups with journalism students at Hickman and Rock Bridge to give us a close look at some specific students' needs. We're also doing more general internet research on high school students technology level and other high school journalism competitions out there. I think we're going in the right direction with our research. It's going to take us some time to do all this new research, but I'm very glad that we have a plan of action. We're working this weekend on preparing our research presentation for the class and faculty on Monday. So, we had a good week this week. I'll be out of town most of next week on a media tour in New York City with the Magazine Club, so I won't be able to do as much work next week. I've been trying to do more work this past week to make up for it. I'm glad that we seem to be on the right track for the moment.

Moving Slowly

This was not a fast paced week of capstoning for our group. No sugar coating here, so I'm getting a little worried.

We did reach a significant milestone this week. On Monday, we put the final touches on our survey and Mike sent it out to a large list serve of high school journalism teachers. We've even got some responses back and it's only been a few days! Even better, the teachers have been vocal and enthusiastic about the project, which is encouraging. So that's a big step for us.

However, I don't think our group knows what the next step for us is next. We are going to wait for more results to pour in and figure out if we want to do another survey next or focus on securing a sponsor or nail down what we want the competition to actually be, which I think we already kind of know. I guess we have some things to decide once more of the results come in, but until then we're just waiting.

Progress

I am happy to say that things are moving along with the planning of our National High School Competition. Ryan, Kate and I had a meeting with Mike, Keith and some other RJI people on Monday to generate ideas about the competition that I think were really helpful. One of the most important things that happened out of that meeting was that we bounced ideas off of each other about what we want the actual competition to look like.

We decided that it should be more content opposed to form based, which I think is a great idea because I don't think high schoolers will be as technologically advanced as college students and this will make for a more interesting competition for them. I'm very excited about the prospects of this idea. I think it's going to be great! I think the storytelling element is going to prove very successful and I'm eager to see what these high schoolers come up with. This would definitely have been a project I would have loved to work on in high school.

As far as what else we accomplished this week, we also wrote a survey for high school journalism teachers to take. We hope that this will help us get to know high schoolers and their skill level better. We hope that this survey will be sent out by the end of the day today. This will also be the first of several surveys.

So, I think we made some good progress this past week and I hope that continues in the weeks to come! I'm really excited for the prospects of this competition though. I think it's going to turn out great!

Getting Started

We were a little slow getting started planning the National High School Competition this week, but I think we're off to a good start at this point. After exchanging a bunch of e-mails and meeting periodically this past week, Kate, Ryan and I have generated a few potential ideas of what we want and don't want this contest to be. We have a big meet with all the faculty involved on Monday, so hopefully that will give us a more concrete idea of what we will be doing on a week-by-week basis for the rest of the semester.

Ryan, Kate and I are meeting more this weekend to develop two different surveys for journalism teachers and students, which is a vital part of the research component for the project. So, I think we are on the right track so far. It's a slow process, but I am sure it'll get much more busy next week and in the weeks ahead. I'm eager to see how this competition develops. We have some of our own ideas, as do the faculty, and I am eager to see how they all come together. I think it's going to be a great final product!

I'm Back

Been a while since I posted. Sorry about that. I'm going to try and be better about posting this semester and try to post at least twice a week. This is my last semester at the University of Missouri and I'm in the Capstone course in convergence journalism. I'm working on a project that involves organizing a national multimedia competition for high school students. Me and my teammates, Kate and Ryan, have to get a sponsor, do research, decide what the competition is going to actually be and get it all ready the end of the semester.

It's going to be quite a challenge, and it seems pretty daunting now, but I'm up for it and excited to get started on it this week. I'm graduating in May and eager to make my final impression on Mizzou in my final months here.