Newspaper club reflections

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Nov-Dec       Jan

Here are the reflections for the school newspaper!

2) Undertaken new challenges or an extension of an existing one
Since this was the first time our school ever had a newspaper, by coming up with the idea and starting the club, I was a risk-taker and was presented with new challenges though out the making of the newspaper.

Firstly, we quickly realized that we didn't have a budget to have a printed newspaper, nor the resources, so we decided to do an online newspaper. We already had all of the photos we would ever need from the photography club (thanks!) but we still needed to orginise sort and choose photos, which lead to a lot of emails between the two clubs (we eventually just decided to have them be at the meetings to save on time)

Another problem we faced was finding out what students wanted in their newspaper. We solved this by creating a survey and giving it to each of the class room. Unfortunately, some people didn't follow the instructions to put tally marks (one class even wrote "mostly", "a few" and "some" !) so we came up a plan where if a majority of the class wanted something, we gave it 3 points, some of the class got 2, a few got 1 and if they didn't respond, the section got 0 points. By putting it in a spread sheet and compiling the data we got, we were able to find the most popular topics to do.

A small section of the results to the survey (the third name option, KCCIS Press wasn't chosen even once!)

3) Planned and Initiated Activities 
Since I was one of the older members in the group, I had to help organize everything and planned who did what. This was done through collecting everyone's email address, and setting up everything in google drive. That way we could see what was being done and everyone could chip in to help edit or format (which we quickly found was one of the most time consuming parts). I helped to set up a new email and twitter account so that students at our school could contact us directly.

I was personally in charge of the World News section and the Books section, so I had to plan things for the younger years to do. For the former section, I had a brainstorming session where we looked up recent world events and had each person choose one to write about. I also asked the students to post their sources so that I could check if they were reliable and unbiased.

For the Books sections, many of the students had ideas for books to review, so I set a deadline for the reviews and let them go off to write them. I also did a "Books vs Movie" review with another student, which was suggested by the student who did it with me.

Lastly, I also helped to edit through many of the sections in the newspaper and find photos to format the page.

The header to the Book section!!

4) Worked collaboratively with others
This was a huge collaborative project with others, as we involved all the students in the school to make decisions about the newspaper, worked with the photography club to get photos, needed to work together with students from all ages to write out and edit the articles.

The collaborative element of the club was my favorite part, since it meant that I could meet and interact with the new Year 7's and 8's, helping them to come up with ideas that would allow them to be a part of the first ever school magazine (sadly it didn't last long... why did you cancel it school?!)

Working together also allowed us to play to each students strengths, such as letting students who loved to read to be involved in more parts of the books section, while letting those who liked speaking to collect and conduct the "Meet the Teachers" interviews.

I also liked the fact that we were able to get strong Mandarin Chinese speakers and writers to add Chinese translations to the pages, which allowed more students in our international school to read and take part in it.

That is all for now, will probably add more photos since this post is a bit text heavy!
- Rebecca