Yesterday was my first meeting with my two lectures for Writing for Mass Communication (MMC 2100) — about 260 students. I wanted to help get the students into thinking about both the course and their potential careers in the media. So in addition to distributing the lecture syllabus, we spent part of the class talking about how technology is changing media jobs.

One example I used for getting news was mobile devices, and I used my own news reading on my iPhone to illustrate. I was able to demonstrate the technology use in PowerPoint by a technology application on the iPhone.

A friend told me how to make a screen capture of the iPhone screen — hold down the button at the bottom of the phone screen and then press the button on the top of the phone. A screen capture is created and goes into the phone’s photo library.

I e-mailed the screen capture to my computer then inserted the photo into my PowerPoint. Certainly such real-life examples are much more relevant and useful than clip art — and was a fun learning-technology activity for me.