During the first class sessions of MIPA 2018, students began learning the basics of writing good feature stories and how to become good interviewers. Throughout the course, students will be looking at different ways that you can tell feature stories through social media apps including Snapchat or through Twitter, according to instructor Julia Satterthwaite.
Satterthwaite said, “(Students’ projects) sort of (depend) on the skill they want to work on. I have them either live tweeting an event, writing a news brief or using a digital media tool for their main in-depth feature story. The big culminating work is the in-depth feature story. I’m recommending that they do it on the Issues panel on suicide. If they have a passion for sports or a particular interest in Desmond Ferguson’s story, they can work on that for their in-depth feature. If suicide is too raw of a topic for them, they have the choice to choose their own (topic).”
Satterthwaite also said she will start Tuesday’s afternoon session at MSU’s Dairy Store.
“They’re going to be working on a team storytelling project where they’re going to be broken into teams of four or five and we’re going to start with some ice cream. They’re going to brainstorm an idea and just walk around, find a story, report it and then we’ll be sharing them out with the class,” Satterthwaite said
Feature Coverage students including Lauren Stallman said they are looking forward to learning new skills.
“I’m definitely looking forward to experience I can get from this class,” Stallman said. “Not just the writing, but definitely the reporting aspect because I’ve had more practice with writing.”
I liked the way you didn’t go into excessive detail about the suicide panel, especially because it is such a sore subject for some of us. The feature coverage final project seems difficult, because of the topic the students must write it on. I enjoyed the clean-cut way you wrote the article, because there’s no fluff or unnecessary material. The quotes are in the right places and make sense in their respective contexts. Overall, it is a very well written brief on the feature coverage class and their assignments and projects.
Hi, I’m Sydney Flaherty from Opinion Coverage. I really enjoyed you’re article as it did a good job describing the activities and topics students will be covering during camp. I also appreciated you’re interview with a student in the class which gave me a new perspective on the course. Overall I think you created an article that balanced lesson plan with personal experience.
Hello Samantha my name is Mackenzie from the Opinion Coverage class at MIPA this year. The introduction paragraph to this article was very informative to how this class is run and gave me and insight to what feature coverage is about. Further into the article there are more examples given to how the teacher is choosing to instruct students and the assignments that they are being given like the storytelling project at the Dairy Store.
I liked how as the author you tried to capture everyone in the class in the photo you used rather than just getting a view of the teacher. Because of your picture angle, you were able to set the mood of the picture showing how the students looked engaged. I also liked how you didn’t go in depth with the suicide coming considering that it is such a sensitive topic to those and you were being really mindful of your intended audience.
This is a every interesting topic and more on the serious side, I like how our youth is being more informed about these serious topic and how it should be considered a topic to talk about. Even if it is a little uncomfortable to talk about it does help a lot of teens to be aware of how they can coop or how they can understand more about this topic that should be brought more, over all I like the article and found it really well done.