Shine news

The gates are down and I hope 2022 is off to a good start for you all after the slog that was 2021. I expect your students are giddy with inspiration and creativity after their Christmas hols (yeah right!, I hear you say), but to help any teachers out there who are struggling to motivate their students or who want get a Shine entry together but have limited time available, this month we will be focusing on our multimedia and podcast categories.

If you are new to the competition and have not yet decided whether you will enter, the most important thing to do now is to get your team motivated to create. At last week’s teachers’ forum one of the strongest messages from Alan and Rosie, teachers with 7 and 1 years’ Shine experience respectively, was that once they opened the gates, the inspiration for content came rushing in.

Students already have their ideas and agendas and giving them the opportunity to communicate those ideas on a platform of their own creation is magical.

Our first Shine Teachers’ Forum via zoom took place last week and was a great success. The idea was to host a really useful meeting which offered loads of encouragement and advice to teachers new to running a student publication. Teachers Rosie and Alan, along with Anneliese, Shine event manager, hosted 9 teachers new to Shine from across the UK.

We are very pleased to have received a generous offer from QuarkXpress – all schools registering with Shine will receive a free sixth month QuarkXPress license and access to monthly webinars.

We are very pleased to have received a large number of registrations for Shine already, and I have a bit of exciting news this week! (Ok, not as exciting as a pay-rise or a term’s sabbatical), but we will be launching a series of Shine forums for groups of up to 15 teachers at a time, to offer opportunities for you to ask questions and receive advice on how to go about running a project with your pupils, how to manage it and anything else relevant to getting your school publication or broadcast entry – ready.

For those of you new to Shine, a great big welcome! We are so excited to have new schools join the competition in 2022 – with the ultimate aim of recognising and rewarding tomorrow’s journalistic and creative talent.