Media classes pioneered 'flipped classrooms'

Something I first posted on my LinkedIn profile, as an experiment.

At all levels of education one of the current hot topics is the flipped classroom. This interest grows out of the increasingly accessible technology most students have in their pocket or purse, I would imagine. But the more I read about this idea, the more I think "everything old is new again."

Student media classes have functioned using the "flipped" model for many years. Class time is normally devoted to "doing": brainstorming, developing coverage lines, editing, writing (if computers are available), designing, adjusting photographs, etc.

Much of the education for media classes takes place online or in professional newspapers, magazines and websites... with students reading and evaluating. There is so much material available online that a student media adviser can best be defined as a curator. The job of the adviser is to sort through the volumes of materials and recommend the best to students.

The reporting (whether verbal or visual) in student media is done primarily outside class. After all, the news isn't happening inside the media class. It's out in the school, or in the community, on athletic fields and in auditoriums. Reporters, by definition, need to "get out there" and report.

A smoothly functioning student media class becomes a place to bring all the reading and planning and thinking and reporting together, with the goal of sharing information with the community. One student may ultimately publish news in the school newsmagazine, the yearbook, the website, social media, and video broadcast.

The teacher/adviser spends her time consulting, prodding, suggesting, praising and questioning. A media adviser in this sort of situation rarely spends time developing structured lesson plans or writing tests. The information and other help student journalists need is always "just in time." And the tests? We would call that publishing.

Headaches (sort of) solved in moving between versions of InDesign

One issue that comes up repeatedly when I speak with advisers and students during workshops is how to save what they work on in, say InDesign CS4, to what they have at school (perhaps CS3). In the past, I sadly had to say, "Well, print out a copy and you can quickly recreate."

But there is a way, I recently discovered, thanks to Tracy Sena on the JEA listserv, who responded to a post asking how to save from CS5 down to CS4. The short answer:

You have to use File>Export and choose InDesign Markup Language (IDML) -- there are several choices under "Save as type" -- and then open that file in CS4.

You might find that the INX (Adobe CS3 interchange) works best for saving "down" from CS4 to CS3.

The good news is that you can always open an older version of InDesign in the newer. The documents just convert and open as "Untitled."

My advice is to simply be aware that moving "down" a version almost always means something gets lost. After all, new versions comes with new options and upgraded code. We simply can't expect a cool effect from CS5 to suddenly work in CS3.

But for those who have students and advisers with different versions on their personal laptops (newer or older), compared to what they have at school, you can at least transfer the bulk of your InDesign work from computer to computer.

The best solution, of course, is to have the school buy some sort of site license that includes a number of laptops in the license, and then have users who need to work on InDesign at home get that newest version installed.