Multimedia and Managing Websites Lesson Plans

ASNE Lesson Plans for Multimedia and Managing Websites

Day One
Multimedia and Managing Websites Lesson – Day One
Multimedia and Managing Websites PowerPoint – Day One
There’s An App For That

Day Two
Multimedia and Managing Websites Lesson – Day Two
Multimedia and Managing Websites PowerPoint – Day Two
Compare/Contrast/Consider

Other Lessons

• The Power of One: Convergence in Scholastic Media
  Integrating print and broadcast journalism in a high school media class.
• Spinning a Web
  A plan to introduce students to Web journalism and how it differs both from print journalism and public relations, with the purpose of creating a school journalism Web site.
• Check It Out on the Web
  A lesson about taking your student media program online.

Multimedia Storytelling Resources and Tutorials
Five Ways Journalism Educators Can Teach Students to Use Multimedia in Breaking News Coverage
Breaking news events can offer a way to incorporate multimedia tools into your class or publication.

Multimedia Storytelling
Not all stories make good multimedia stories. The best are multi-dimensional. They include action for video, a graphic, someone who can give some pithy quotes for video or audio, and/or strong emotions for still photos and audio. Most multimedia stories require that the reporter go into the field to report.

Picking the Right Media for Reporting a Story
This tutorial goes through the different types of media — video, photos, audio, graphics/maps and text — and the kinds of stories or characteristics of stories that lend themselves to each.

The Transition to Digital Journalism
A look at the major digital tools and trends that are disrupting the news industry and changing the way journalists do their jobs.

Coding and Programming
Data visualization has become an important component of storytelling, allowing journalists multiple avenues to present information and content to audiences in the digital era. Here is a guide to using google to learn how to code.

Audio

Audacity is open-source, free sound-editing software that offers cross-platform compatibility.

SoundCiteJS makes including audio in stories more seamless by putting it right under the text. Viewers can then listen from the same window while they continue to read.

Soundslides has become a standard for creating audio slideshows due to its simple interface, low cost and its devotion to journalistic storytelling. To post Soundslides material on some sites, it must be converted to video. This can only be done with the professional version of the program. To convert it, go here.

A voice-overs is a narration done by a reporter, usually from a script. The voice is recorded over video clips that tell the story. A standup is when a reporter appears on camera to narrate part of a story.

GIFs
Gifs are slideshows of images or short videos (or both) that play on repeat. This article from Poynter discusses the prevalence of Gifs in the world of multimedia, and how they can be effectively translated into a journalistic setting. It mentions the different Gif makers that are available on the internet, (Gickr, Gifsoup) and the smartphone apps (Cinemagram, Gifboom) that have created social media networks around gifs. Here is an example of how a prominent news website used gifs to supplement a story.

Google GIFs lets you search just for animated GIFs — and Storify now lets you embed them, too.

Infographics
Infographics take information, like numbers or statistics, and make them easy for the reader to understand. They are visually engaging, and the more creative, the better. If an infographic is good, the reader should be able to look at the infographic and after a quick glance understand what the numbers mean and why they matter. Here is a list from online tech magazine Onextrapixel of user-friendly websites for making infographics and tutorials.

Piktochart is an easy online resource for making infographics. Here is a step-by-step guide.

Google Fusion Tables are still in its experimental phrase, but they allow you to make visual representations of your own data and from data elsewhere on the Web.

Datawrapper is an efficient tool for making charts and embedding them into websites. It’s free.

Tableau Public is another free resource that allows you to take data from online databases and convert it into an interactive representation of the data in three easy steps.

Video
Final Cut Pro is the video editing software of choice for journalists using Apple computers. Final Cut Pro does not make a version for Windows.

iMovie is a simple, easy to use video editing program that comes free with the Apple operating system (it has no Windows PC version).

Premiere is the most popular video editing program that works on both Windows PCs and Apple computers. Made by Adobe, it is comparable to the Final Cut Pro video editing program for the Apple platform.

Once you’ve finished editing your video (or audio), you’ll need to reduce its file size so it can be published on the Web.