Bringing interactive journalism into the middle school: A conversation with Laura Fay

Laura Fay is a Reading teacher at Fisher Middle School in Ewing, New Jersey. For the last three years, she has been an active collaborator in the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers (http://www.tcnj.edu/~ijims), a demonstration project at The College of New Jersey funded by the National Science Foundation’s Broadening Participation in Computing Program. (CNS #073973).

The goal of the IJIMS project is to expose students and teachers interactive journalism as a way of raising students’ interest in and awareness of computing careers. In a summer program and after-school club, participants created multimedia story packages, based on original reporting, that included text, video, images and animations created in Scratch, a programming language for novices created at MIT. Fay and her colleagues intend to continue the IJIMS project after its formal conclusion on August 31, 2010. This interview was recorded August 13, 2010 at the Scratch@MIT conference, where Fay and fellow teacher Marcy Havens presented their work along with the project’s Principle Investigator, TCNJ Associate Professor Ursula Wolz, and its external evaluator, Meredith Stone.

Please read and rate our proposal to the Knight News Challenge

With my collaborators on the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers I am applying for a grant from the Knight News Challenge to scale up our demonstration program to additional school and community settings throughout Mercer County New Jersey.  The demonstration project, which has been supported by the National Science Foundation’s Broadening Participation in Computing program, (grant #0739173) has yielded evidence that middle school students can become turned on to computer science by learning to do computational journalism in their own communities.  Further, we’ve established that properly trained and empowered, middle school teachers can become catalysts for change and innovation.  We’ve been fortunate to work with some exceptional teachers at Fisher Middle School in Ewing, New Jersey who will form the core of a network of teacher-mentors that we hope to build across the region.

Although the deadline for submitting new applications has past, you can still read our proposal, rate it and make comments:

Thanks in advance. I look forward to reading your thoughts.