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!