If you ask college journalism professors what weaknesses today’s journalism students have, you’ll probably hear that the students don’t know basic grammar rules. The students may have taken AP English in high school and may have high SAT scores, but many don’t know what a compound sentence is or how to punctuate one. When I […]
UF is a Pepsi campus – After about five years of being a Coca Cola campus, UF signed an exclusive agreement with Pepsi. The trucks came and took away all the Coke machines and replaced them with Pepsi machines. A few of the machines, like this one, even promote UF’s National Championship basketball program. Only […]
The students this semester have more questions than usual. “When does the paper run the name of someone under the age of 18?”“When do we put a dateline on a story?”“Why don’t all the AP stories include a reporter’s byline?”“Is the news I’m reading at AOL real news or is it fake news?” They’ve only […]
The polls are open today in Gainesville for early voting for the Presidential primaries. I thought this would be a good day to vote and think about the power of change that is possible through civic engagement. Often voter turnout in primaries and elections is below 50 percent of eligible voters. The blame is placed […]
The classroom certainly affects the teaching and learning experience. This is the view from the back of one of the auditoriums I teach in. I stopped to take this photo as I was leaving class. Over the years, I’ve taught in lots of different classrooms – for university classes, high school classes, summer journalism institutes, […]
We’re beginning news writing in Writing for Mass Communication. When I asked the students who hasn’t written a news story before, about 220 of the 260 students in the course raised their hands. The other students were on their high school newspaper staffs – or a few on community college newspapers before transferring to UF. […]
Today’s entry is in response to why I didn’t have an entry yesterday. We all have those computer situations where we are relearning a lesson we already learned. In this case, the wisdom of saving files. Tumblr is a very easy-to-use blog program. After you set up your account and your blog template, you create […]
In a Google search to find the photo of a newspaper front page to use in today’s lecture on newspaper design and terminology, I was delighted to discover that the Newseum’s online site includes a section of daily newspaper front pages. You can sort the newspaper selection by country or state and have great examples […]
I really would like to know all my students’ names. In an auditorium class with 160 students, that’s not realistic…although I do know faculty who can do that. I definitely want to learn the names of the 20 students in my writing lab, but I only see them once a week. Here’s a strategy I […]
Once the semester starts, “I’m still grading” seems to be an on-going line for me. With Writing for Mass Communication, the students complete at least one writing assignment every week. One goal for instructors is to evaluate that writing assignment and return the graded assignment to the students the following week. We hope that receiving […]
Julie Dodd 