Foundation : teachers

'New Commerce Department site serves as a hub for teaching web skills'

Sandy Woodcock — Fri, 20 May 2011 15:17:00 GMT

If you are looking for a destination website to all things digital, check out www.DigitalLiteracy.gov. From the link to the Copyright Poster Guide by the Copyright Alliance Education to the link to StopBullying.Gov For Kids, the site is a repository for digital topics. According to the Department of Commerce's May 13 press release, "In partnership with nine federal agencies, the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), created www.DigitalLiteracy.gov to provide librarians, teachers, workforce trainers, and others a central location to share digital literacy content and best practices." Check it out, there is something here to assist educators and citizens everywhere. The more you know...

E-mail: It’s a Blast

Marina Hendricks — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Editor's note: This is the second of three installments from an NAA Foundation interview with Dana Plewka, educational services manager at the Denver Newspaper Agency.

You have a spiffy new Web site, updated a few minutes ago with yesterday's classroom content. How do you get the word out to teachers?

Plewka advocates the use of e-mail blasts, which are sent to large audiences (in this case, an NIE mailing list) on a moment's notice.

Once you educate yourself on how to make your blasts relevant and interesting to teachers, there's no reason not to send them to your audience, Plewka says. Basic graphic design and marketing techniques are a plus, and educating yourself about spam filters is vital. But the art of the e-mail blast is not hard to master.

"You don't have to be technologically savvy to learn these skills," she says.

And e-mail blasts are essentially free, provided that your newspaper pays for Internet service. Mailing paper newsletters can cost thousands of dollars over time, Plewka says.

After all, you don't usually find easy, immediate and free rolled into one.

-- By Rashad Mulla, NAA Foundation intern

NIE: teacher-to-teacher marketing

Marina Hendricks — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:23:00 GMT

Barbara Allen of the Tulsa World and Kelsea Gurski of The State Journal Register in Springfield, Ill., covered the 2008 Young Reader Conference for the Foundation. Here's an excerpt from their Phoenix roundup on NIE teacher-to-teacher marketing.

I'll post more of Barbara's and Kelsea's nuggets in the coming days. If you'd like to read their full account, which includes photos, click here.

Teacher-to-Teacher Marketing

When Cindy Piller, educational services manager for the Times-Call in Longmont, Colo., needed a creative, effective sponsor thank-you ad quickly, she turned to an amazing resource - teachers.

Pictures and stories from NIE teachers explaining benefits students have reaped from newspapers in the classroom have resulted in the most effective ads Piller has used, and the approach is simple.

"Teachers are at the core of what we do," she said.

"You are selling learning. You are selling a different way for kids to learn that impacts them, that improves their test scores. You are selling learning, not just teaching, not just education. But these students will learn reading the newspaper."

Why should the NIE coordinator be speaking in an ad telling teachers to subscribe? Instead, Piller said, let teachers use their own voices in ads about them, their students, their classrooms and their creative ways for using the newspaper as a teaching tool.

Picking the right teacher is not as important as simply putting teachers in the ads. Include teachers with clout, male teachers and those who teach English language-learners, Piller suggested, and incorporate plenty of comments about student response. Photograph teachers in their classrooms and your newspaper studio against white backdrops for Photoshop cutouts and take more than just headshots. Make the message and photographs big, and show teachers and students together.

"My advice is, if you can, turn it up a notch," Piller said.

Results she has seen from these ads include:

Teachers sharing more information on how they are using the newspaper
Teachers calling the NIE coordinator about cool projects they are doing
Teacher orders increasing
Sponsors becoming easier to recruit
Sponsor renewals becoming easier and bigger
Vacation donations increasing because explaining what teachers are doing with newspapers is easier.