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!