Before deciding that teaching was what I wanted to do, I was
considering going into the “newspaper business.” Throughout my schooling and still today I
love to write. For this reason one of
the things I wanted to start when I began teaching was a student
newspaper. Many high schools have school
newspapers, but not many elementary schools have a school newspaper.
My first few years teaching, my students and I were able to
create a student newspaper. Since
writing, collecting, and editing stories takes a great deal of time (especially
when lessons and teaching, rightfully, takes up most of the time in school) for
the first few years we normally “published” three or four issues of the
newspaper. These issues turned out very
good, but the time of distribution and consistency of distribution varied
greatly from year to year and issue to issue.
When my district upgraded our website design they also made
it easier for staff to create and update their class websites. This gave our librarian and I the idea of
making our school newspaper digital. Now
instead of having to wait to collect an issues worth of stories we would be
able to post stories to the website as they were completed.
Overall this method has increased the excitement for our
school newspaper. Since changing the
newspaper to an online format students in all grades have submitted stories and
artwork. Students can write stories at
any time and then use the forms that have been set up to submit their stories
to the student editors and myself via email.
By going “paperless” our school newspaper, The Valleyview Buzz, has grown significantly
when compared to our paper versions of the past.
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