Ahead of the Shine Awards deadline, here’s how to make things easier

Hello everyone,

It’s March, the days are longer and (whisper it) Spring might be around the corner. Something else is coming soon: our deadline for the Shine Awards 2024, at the beginning of May. If that prospect feels daunting, or makes your students think they might need to abandon a school project that hasn’t quite come together yet, take heart. They might have already nailed it.

So what if the project, like your student team, has many parts? Rather than this being a problem of disparity and competing voices, perhaps it’s a solution, especially at this point in the school calendar.

Obviously a school magazine doesn’t have the resources of a national publication, but it is most likely produced by a massively diverse classroom with all kinds of interests – including how they consume media. This idea of many students; many interests; many types of media begins to suggest how these resources could in fact be blended to create a similar multi-level model. This is where things get interesting too, from a Shine Awards judging perspective.

Could the parts of a student project with many strands actually be a whole?

Many Shine entries mix a range of such elements into a single school media project that tells stories in a rounded, in-depth way that just one media never could. One student can begin with an interview on a podcast, another can report the same topic as an opinion piece and a third can showcase a visual aspect to the story with a photograph or video.

And we’ve got an award for it: best multimedia.

So, even if your students’ project isn’t cohesive, it might just be trying to mix media in a distinctive way. If they are doing this, we want to hear about it…

Don’t forget, you can submit your entry right now. It’s never too early, but we’d like you to avoid being too late!

As ever, if you have questions about your entry for the Shine School Media Awards 2024, just drop us a line at shine@stationers.org

Til next time,

Richard
Chair of Shine