The SchoolNet News Network is a national online journalism project, developed by STEM~Net and sponsored by Canada's SchoolNet. Since 1996, SNN -- along with its French counterpart Rédaction de Rescol -- has been giving students a chance to share their ideas with an unlimited audience via the Internet.

SNN teaches students how the media works, gets them writing in a journalistic style and lets them publish their work in an emerging media form. The Internet is the only form of publishing that allows a journalist to incorporate everything from text and graphics to sound and movie pictures, as long as they have the right accessories.

A new edition of SNN is published each month on the Web. But the site is continually updated as new stories, photos, video and audio segments come in from reporters across the country.

Here are some ways your students can get involved in SNN:

• Your students can become regular contributors to SNN. Encourage interested students to form a SNN news team. Each month, one student can lead the group in discussions of story ideas and current issues in their school or community. The students can come up with ideas for stories and let the SNN coordinator know they're working on them.
  
• The student reporters can decide for themselves who will do a story in any given month. With help from the SNN coordinator and the SNN journalism mentors, they can do research and interviews and write stories for publication on the SNN site.
  
• Because SNN is a multi-media site, students have the option of sending in video or audio segments to go along with their written material. There's also room for still photos. Reporters can work in teams to produce multi-media stories. For example, one person can record video while the other does an interview. Together, they can write a story and include a 30-second segment of their taped interview.

Teachers aren't expected to put in a lot of extra time to coach student journalists working on SNN. Just get in touch with the SNN coordinator, Beth Ryan, and she'll help the students get started and line them up with mentors from the journalism community who can read and critique their work throughout the process.

For more information on how SNN works, see the About SNN section.

Back to In the Classroom