What: News Sim 3.0 provides high school journalism teachers with five realistic multimedia reporting assignments. A new simulation has just been added bringing the total to five. The newest stimulation is designed to get newbie student journalists writing and on the road to being best student journalists they can be.

Where: News Sim 3 is available exclusively through the JEA bookstore.

What are the simulations? Bank Robbery, School Shooting?, City Council Meeting, Tornado! and Basketball Scandal--are designed to improve students’ writing, news gathering and critical thinking skills as the simulations increase in complexity and duration. The simulations require students to listen and take notes of video interviews, press conferences and telephone messages, and read and interpret public documents.

Who: The authors of News Sim are Brian Poulter and James Tidwell, journalism professors at Eastern Illinois University. Their original effort in creating an interactive assignment resulted in Fire Scene, a single simulation that won first place in the 2002 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication “Best of Web” competition in the category of teaching websites.

Testimonial:
"I’m absolutely in love with News Sim. Today was the first day I actually had all the kids working with it at the same time (versus one kid here or there as a remediation), and they were so entranced. They were flipping back and forth between screens, watching and re-watching things while taking notes. They each had their headsets on, and it was so easy to use that I just sat in the back of the room with my feet up and read the Post. You guys are awesome. Now can you make a CD that makes teaching Yearbook and Newspaper just as easy?"

-- Chad Rummel, CJE, Oakton High School, Vienna, VA --

Requirements to run: News Sim 3.0 is available to high school programs around the country. News Sim 3.0 comes on a CD, and uses Adobe Acrobat and QuickTime Player software. The CD is compatible with both Mac and Windows computers.

Cost: A News Sim 3.0 site license purchased through the Journalism Education Association Bookstore (Item #950) is $145 for members and $160 for nonmembers. The license allows an individual high school purchaser to install the software on an unlimited number of computers at that school.

More about News Sim (PDF)