Good bye, yearbook staff! So long, newspaper staff!
Be gone, web staff! Out the door, broadcast staff!
It's a new day, and information dissemination is totally
different from what we knew in the past.
At Travis High School, the advanced journalism students are taking production
to a new level and joining other staffs across the nation in adopting a convergent media approach.
This site is
dedicated to our growth, the trial and error process, the new technology that has brought us to where we are.
Our
history
Travis High School opened its doors in the fall of 2006 with freshmen and sophomores. The first graduating
class will be in 2009.
 The school was built for technology. Most classrooms have at least five student
computers and a teacher computer. Our journalism suite has 35 computers. Most classrooms have an overhead built in LCD projector
for showing videos, PowerPoints and other presentations. Some classes have document cameras in addition, which hook into the
projector.
But even though we had a broadcast journalism class with eager students ready to tell the story of the
school through the lens of a video camera, we had no video cameras. We had no equipment of any kind. We opened our doors in
the middle of a freeze on technology, and we had to wing it.
So we did some multimedia things, and we did narration. We
learned to do podcasts. At the end of the first year, we received two Sony camcorders. That was the extent of our equipment.
The second year was even more frustrating. The school inherited some video equipment from another school, but because
it was bought with federal funds with certain stipulations, it had to be used by a vocational program, and we did not qualify.
So we worked with a vocational class, and for several weeks stayed late to plan and rehearse for a morning news show. When
we were about two days away from launching our first show, there was bad news. The building was not completely cabled, and
many teachers did not have the proper software on their computers.
 So we began looking for alternatives that wouldn't cost a fortune, and
as we discovered the alternatives and how easy it would be to use them in our program, we saw that it would be beneficial
to combine all the journalism programs into a single team, with everyone learning everything.
And Jake Palenske,
president and CEO of NCompass Media, a company that does multimedia and works with schools to produce DVD yearbook supplements,
helped us to find our focus. See his presentation here.
Through this web site, we will try out new technology, see what works for us and what does not. Hopefully, we
will emerge with a strong product. And maybe some former jteacher.com visitors can find some things that will work for them
as well.
 We really are not abandoning newspapers and yearbooks. Far
from it. The change to convergent media just means that all students will learn and practice all aspects of news gathering
and dissemination. Students will write, photograph, videotape, blog online, do podcasts, do layouts for yearbook and newspaper,
maintain web pages, and promote it all through social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook (from home, of course).
This site is not about full-blown broadcast journalism. There are plenty of great web sites out there that are dedicated
to that. This one is about incorporating new media technology into a journalism program to give it more life and give
students new experiences and expertise they can carry with them to their lives beyond high school while gaining a deeper understanding
of the media and how to tell stories in a variety of ways.
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