Teaching Tools

Summer is here and that means journalism professors are starting to plan their syllabus for the fall.

We’ve maintained a long list of teaching tools on Journalist’s Toolbox over the years, including a few remote teaching resources. The site also includes college media and high school journalism pages.

This fall will be a transitional one for many schools welcoming college and high school students back from remote teaching. Others will continue to teach some courses remotely, particularly larger classes.

We’ve compiled a few resources we think will be helpful to all the profs and student media this fall:

• Extra Points FOIA Directory: A collection of college athletics-related open records (contracts, budgets etc.) that is free for everybody. Documents are acquired via FOIA. Users can contribute as well.

• Verification Handbook (second edition): Part of the Data Journalism Handbook, this free ebook offers case studies, tools and techniques for fact-checking photos, videos and more. I use it in all of my classes.

• Dart Center Resources for Journalism Educators: Dart Academic Fellow and San Diego State Associate Professor of Journalism, Amy Schmitz Weiss compiled a useful package of resources for teaching students to report responsibly on violence, trauma and tragedy.

• Campus Safety and Security Data Analysis Cutting Tool: Analyze college campus crime statistics with this resource from the Office of Postsecondary Education, part of the U.S. Department of Education.

• FIRE: Guide to Free Speech on Campus: A helpful ebook from the Foundation of Individual Rights on Campus.

• Journalism Education Association (JEA) Podcasting Guide: This short list of resources is everything you need to get your student publication or class up and running on podcasting.

• Student Press Law Center: This is a must-bookmark for any student newsroom. For nearly 50 years, SPLC has offered legal advice, FOIA resources and other free resources to high school and student newsrooms. The nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, based in Washington D.C., also provides information, training and legal assistance at no charge to students and educators. 

Video: This six-part series on search tools is an excellent teaching resource. Assign a new video for the students to watch each week for homework, then have them apply the skills to an in-class or homework assignment each week. They’ll be search ninjas in no time!

Journalism Books: We’ve launched a short page of good journalism books and need your help. Check out the page, then suggest any titles, links to their sites and list why it’s a good journalism book on this form. We hope to build out this digital library on the Toolbox by the end of the summer, just in time for classes to start.

Cool Tool Tuesday

Don’t forget that at 1 p.m. CT each Tuesday, we feature a new resource on #cooltooltuesday. Be sure to check it out and retweet it.

Around the Web …

Some useful tools you can use for free …

• The Open Notebook is a nonprofit organization that has published more than 500 articles on science journalism.

• Stacksearch is a Substack newsletter search tool.

• Pimeyes is a facial recognition reverse image search tool.

In Quotes …

“We will only attain freedom if we learn to appreciate what is different and muster the courage to discover what is fundamentally the same.”

--Thurgood Marshall

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