We’re baaaaaaaack! Awesome first meeting of the year with the @NewRoarTimes crew!

 
The New Roar Times (@NewRoarTimes) is back for the year! We had our inaugural meeting today, and the writers had great ideas for how to kick it up a notch now that they’re in middle school. (We started the paper when they were in 3rd grade!) 

New features may include podcasts, videos, and more frequent book reviews. Also, we designated editors for Science, Tech, Recipes, Video Game Reviews, and other sections. We talked about how choosing peer reviewers will help delegate responsibility and encourage a “consistent voice” for particular sections. Oh, the possibilities…

Grateful for yet another awesome year of working with the student reporters of @The_School’s @NewRoarTimes.

I spent Wednesdays from 11:00-11:30am with this amazing group of 4th graders. They gave up 30 minutes of recess time in order to exercise in a different way. They researched, wrote, linked, and cited their way into my heart, and every week I reminded them how much I enjoyed our sessions.

This year, Editor-in-Chief Hope D., reached out to other classes, and it was so gratifying to hear back from 3rd-8th graders who are interested in submitting guest posts to the New Roar Times. Can’t wait for next year!

Follow the kids on Twitter: @NewRoarTimes

Extra! Extra! The @NewRoarTimes student newspaper at @The_School is back in business!

After our long summer hiatus, The New Roar Times has officially re-launched for the 2013-2014 school year. Last year, a couple of 3rd graders had a desire to produce a student-run newspaper, and I was thrilled that they asked me to be a part of their adventure. There’s nothing I’d rather do than help a child succeed. My weekly half-hour sessions with the staff were a highlight of my year, and I was really glad that these kids enthusiastically rallied to start up the paper again this year.

Hope, our impressively hard-working, prolific, and enthusiastic Editor-in-Chief, managed to gather over 30 of her 4th grade classmates to participate in this year’s newspaper! This year, as Hope informed me, we’ll even have foreign correspondents! Two of her classmates are currently abroad in France and England yet still able to contribute to The New Roar Times. Check out her sign-up sheet (in the photo gallery above) where she reminded students that signing up meant making a commitment. I owe a debt of gratitude to Heather Tyrrell, 4th grade teacher, who had a heart-to-heart early in the year with her class about what it means to make a commitment and stick to it.

Our workflow involves a shared GoogleSite where students write a new post for each article and include their text and the URL for any images. Then Hope or I help edit the piece. Finally, we copy and paste the text and images onto our newspaper’s website powered by RebelMouse. Since you have to be 13 to use RebelMouse, I (or Hope’s mom) login and monitor this process. Similarly, I (or Hope’s mom) oversee the postings to our Twitter feed as well.

Find us online!
Our website: http://NewRoarTimes.com
Our Twitter: http://twitter.com/NewRoarTimes

Here’s a link to my post about the launch of The New Roar Times last year.