2024 Bonus Classes
Schools arriving at the workshop before 6 p.m. on Sunday, June 23, have the opportunity to attend bonus classes offering additional in-depth instruction in a variety of areas helpful for students working on broadcasts, online sites, newspapers, magazines and yearbooks.
Workshop registration is $140 per student or adviser for the workshop course, and the Sunday bonus class is an additional $20 per person.
Adobe Illustrator
This three-hour tour of Illustrator is designed for those who haven’t used the program before or feel a little rusty. Don’t worry if you feel like you can’t draw. We’ll cover the basic drawing tools, techniques to combine shapes and simple ways to make fun text-based art.
You’ll walk away with skills to create custom icons or emojis, logos, or graphic elements to use across newspaper and yearbook spreads.
Adobe Photoshop
The bonus class will be split between Beginning and Advanced Photoshop groups for students and advisers.
We’ll start the evening with a quick overview of the basic tools in Photoshop before going through a workflow for making sure that photos look their best in your publication.
Once we complete workflow, we’ll break up into beginning and advanced sections. In the beginning section students will learn additional editing techniques for cleaning up photos along with some simple methods for creating cutouts. In the advanced section students will do a deeper dive into creating cutouts before looking at more advanced techniques like adjustment layers, type effects and the differences between Lightroom and Photoshop, along with other editing tools.
Students need to bring a laptop with a recent version of Photoshop to participate, but two students from the same school can share a computer as long as they are in the same section. This bonus class is designed for students that want to improve their image-editing skills, not use Photoshop as an illustrative tool.
Adobe Premiere Pro
This class will provide an overview of Adobe Premiere as well as best practices in video editing for journalistic video storytelling.
Students will each need their own computer with Adobe Premiere already downloaded. Please log in to Adobe Creative Cloud before the workshop and ensure that each student will be able to access the software through a personal or school Adobe account.
Artificial Intelligence in Journalism
This class is meant to help introduce generative artificial intelligence programs to beginner and intermediate users. In particular, the class will focus on how to ethically use A.I. in scholastic journalism, ethical and legal considerations, staff policies, and actually using A.I. to brainstorm, create and help our publications.
As will become clear through discussion, use of A.I. is about efficiency and problem solving. Think about what your publication struggles with in terms of time, skill or quality. Consider all steps of the journalistic process: idea generation, newsgathering, production, and distribution. (Don’t forget about teambuilding, marketing and sales.)
It would be helpful for students to have access to laptops for this session, but it can be completed on a tablet or smartphone as well.
Leadership
Summer is the time to prepare to take on the many leadership roles of publication staffs. Whether you are “The Editor” or “An Editor” you are a leader on your staff. Leaders know how to organize, work with others and set expectations. They also become the cheerleaders and are constantly looking ahead to see what needs to be done and who should be doing it. We’ll spend time trying to get you off to a great start in your leadership role.
Level Up Your Social Media
UNLEASH your storytelling superpowers on social media. AMPLIFY your voice. BUILD a strong presence. SPARK meaningful engagement. TRANSFORM reporting.
On the Money: Creating Revenue for Your Publication
A panel of instructors will discuss and lead activities in a variety of approaches to generating revenues. From fundraising to influencers and marketing to YouTube monetization, the course will cover a variety of ideas to improve your publication’s bottom line.
Photo Hacks from the Pros
This class will cover the best tips from a working visual content creator. Whether you’re a smartphone photographer or an experienced photojournalist, this class will give you the scoop on how hacks can upgrade your visual storytelling skills. Bring your smartphones or cameras you use in covering high school assignments.
We’ll go out and build content using some of these little known hacks!
Sportswriting and Editing
Whether you are a rookie reporter or a seasoned editor of your sports section (or even if you ARE the sports section), there will be tips for all as we talk all things sports coverage from ideas and interviewing to game coverage, features, planning, multimedia, and more.
What’s Your Story?
A jump start on your college essay will make your senior year so much easier. We will explore what a good college essay looks like, what you should include and how to write in your authentic voice and tell your story. We will even have some time to write and share. And the bonus — your college essay doubles as a personal column for your newspaper.
Gloria Shields NSPA Media Workshop
National Scholastic Press Association • info@studentpress.org • 612-200-9254