During our meeting at Poynter we discussed how the media is changing, how media consumers are changing, how our students are changing, and how our teaching is changing.

• Traditional newspaper reading is declining and newspapers themselves are decreasing in size or circulation or scope. We’re all reading online — on computers and mobile devices.
• Newspaper in Education programs are being closed due to budget cuts. A few NIE programs are adapting by teaching newspaper use on computers or SMART Boards instead of bundles of newspapers.
• Students say they can multi-task and often want to do so during our classes. We’re often telling students to stay focused in our classes but in meetings say we can multi-task with laptop computers and cell phones. (Paige Madsen photographed me blogging from my iPhone during the panel I was on.)
• We have ever-changing and expanding options for sharing information and finding information and helping students learn how to be ready for the media industry. We can twitter as a way of quickly get news out. We can use monitter.com to keep up with tweets. Facebook can be a way of finding sources or a way of sharing too much of our personal lives. We can use blogs as current examples to supplement our textbooks or maintain our own blog as a teaching tool.

We can be scared or excited or confused or liberated. We can wait for the next developments. We can help determine the next developments.

The mid-winter meeting was a wonderful opportunity to share information, concerns, ideas, tips and research with members of the Poynter staff and with our Scholastic Journalism Division colleagues.