A whole new ecosystem of journalism.

 I remember graduating high school in 2006. We didn't have computers in the classroom. No projectors. Whiteboards. We had blackboards. Chalk. The library and encyclopedias were our resources, internet-based research just evolving. Social media? You mean MySpace? Facebook was that weird "yearbooky" thing over in the U.S.

My shiny classroom. (This is after my students helped me clean it at the end of the year, it's normally not this empty.)

I started teaching in 2013. My classroom was the jackpot of all classrooms, as far as I was concerned. Whiteboards? Please. Let's talk about SmartBoard technology. About 18 student computers in my room. A brand new teacher computer. With dual screens. A classroom set of Kindles. An iPod carts, iPads available for students to check out. Written essays replaced by video projects. GoogleDrive to run and manage student collaboration.

All of this isn't even touching on social media or developing an online publication. Both of these are goals for me this upcoming school year.

Last year, I started teaching journalism with a flourishing newspaper and an all but defunct website. I wonder where I'll be, where my students will be by the end of this coming school year.

Just as technology is ever evolving and changing the world around us, journalism is evolving with it. Dan Gillmore's presentation showed just how powerful these changes are for our students and media in general. These are some points I'm taking out of his talk:

Dan Gillmor speaking about journalism in a networked age

• With social media, a whole new ecosystem of journalism is evolving. We need to teach students the ramification and the responsibility that comes with this. 
• Journalism is not lecture anymore, it's a conversation. To be a successful student publication, we need to draw on this. It's long past the time that journalists could pretend to know everything. 
• Figuring out what's trustworthy is hard in a Photoshop world. Establishing a "credibility scale" might be a great strategy to get students thinking about evaluating sources. 
• Objectivity is a unicorn. We should teach our students to sort all news into a category of "Interesting, if true" - this way they don't just buy into anything that they find at a cursory glance at the interwebs.
• Teach students that fact checking needs to happen BEFORE news gets public, not after. Even with technology evolving and audiences demanding "insta-news", maybe it's not so bad to uphold just a tiny bit of an old-fashioned viewpoint. 

Yes, it often boggles my mind to think of how far we've come in just a handful of years. I try to think where we'll be in five, ten, twenty-five years from now. It's almost more than my poor mind can handle. That's why it's so important for teachers to move with technology. 

It's incredibly exciting and terrifying the same time. 

Stephanie Floch

Taylorsville High School

SLC, Utah