Making News Today
Partners - Digital Media Centre; University of Wollongong; Apple Computer Australia; WIN Television; Australian Research Council
2006
Making News Today is a website and associated classroom program to assist high school students to learn about and critically analyse news media in its various forms.
One activity involves using professional footage gathered by WIN Television News to create their own versions of news segments and comparing it with the story that went to air.
During the course of this program they create a news item from scratch using the online advice from an expert journalist. Some of these snippets may even be shown "on air" (on WIN Television News) or be made available for viewing in the site's public gallery.
The website has a "teen friendly" graphical design — keeping the television journalist theme with a youth look. It contains resources and interactive tools that support each activity in the educational program and complement the resources and tools that are in the classroom.
There are also specific support resources for teachers who may not be familiar with using technology in their teaching and/or using the educational approaches, such as video text construction or group learning, in their teaching.
An extensive research program is determining just what the program achieves in terms of helping students to develop multiliteracies, and helping teachers refine their quality teaching approaches. This involves classroom observations, interviews with teachers and students, and the analysis of student news stories.
Screenshots
The front page provides access to all the areas, as well as notifying the user of any new posts or blog entries.
Each area has a central overview page that contains links to tasks, blogs (group and personal) and associated resources.
This task is about looking similarities and differences in how media portray events.
This task is about undstanding the 5 steps that are involved in the creation of a news segment.