Are You in Alignment? Aligning Your Mission to Institutional Mission

Today, I am presenting this professional development seminar at the Associated Collegiate Press and College Media Advisers fall convention in Louisville, Kentucky.

Lucky for me, I had several doctoral hours in my higher education program that taught me about assessment, learning outcomes, strategic planning in higher education, general administration and financing of higher education. Most people in student media aren't that lucky. So we often think of strategic planning and, heaven forbid, ASSESSMENT, as a wicked waste of time. Far from it my friends. You can use these bemoaned tasks to ingratiate yourself with the upper administration, you alumni and your current employees. When you can point to a mission and strategy that guides all of your decisions, it makes those decisions much easier.

I hope this session helps people who are student media advisers. I hope this slideshare presentation also helps. And I hope you come back to visit me as I continue working on research about student media, mission statements, strategic planning and image.

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Are You in Alignment?

View more presentations from Kay Colley.

Google Map Update for My Newsplex Weeks

After my two weeks in South Carolina, I have updated my first Google Map including a representative photo that I took at each location. Here's the map:
View South Carolina June 2010 in a larger map

It's interactive, so click on the sites to see the photos.

If you want to see all of the photos that were taken at each location, go to my Flickr streams:

• Columbia, South Carolina
• Charleston, South Carolina
• Folly Beach, South Carolina
• Savannah, Georgia

Texas Wesleyan IABC Celebrates First Year on Campus

We celebrated the first full year of Texas Wesleyan's International Association of Business Communicators chapter. This Animoto slideshow includes a photo of the charter officers and begins with a photo of our co-presidents Shelby Hofsteter-Driver and Laurence Sheehan.

Texas Wesleyan IABC looks forward to another great year, including increased collaboration with the Fort Worth professional chapter, which will be led this year by Texas Wesleyan Director of Marketing and Communication Laura Hanna.


Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Slideshow of Rambler TIPA Contest Preparation Day

During my second week at Newsplex, my 500 GB hard drive imploded, sending all of my documents into oblivion. Fortunately, I was able to recover everything, at least I think everything, by using a software program.

So as part of my training and to improve my skills, I created this audio slideshow of photos that I took when Jonathan Resendez, Conner Howell and Chuck Fain helped me prepare the contest entries for the Texas Intercollegiate Press Contest. I wrote and recorded the script using Visual Communicator on Wednesday.

This is my belated tribute. Hey better late than never...and a good way to get some photos off of my drive and into a format that others can appreciate. Or at least poke fun at.

Animoto Slideshow of Newsplex Week 2

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.


The final week of Newsplex is coming to a close. A great group of folks attended for the second week as well. It's been a great way to meet and learn about new people, including two international journalists/professors.

Because many of the exercises from this week were the same as last week, I didn't do most of them; however, I did do some additional exercises using some of my own content.

I also did this great exercise today--a stand up, on-camera response to a news anchor. I have a more profound respect for my broadcast friends. Wow--remembering what to do and say and listen to that person in your ear is tough! I'll definitely need more practice on this, and now I have a great exercise to subject my students to. I know you're all looking forward to that. And so am I, but I'll tough it out with you and get the practice as well.

Week 2 Newsplex Training 2010

Today starts my second week fo training at Newsplex at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina. This week focuses on teaching and researching convergence.

I spent the weekend touring a couple of cities--Charleston, SC, and Savannah, GA, so I'll be posting content from those whirlwind trips shortly. You all will be subjected some more multimedia storytelling techniques when I'm posting this content so that I can continue to practice some of the software programs that I learned last week.

A couple of great tips from last week's seminar:

• Adrive allows you 50GB of free storage space. Sign up for an account and begin backing up your data. Too bad I hadn't discover this until one of my external drives had a meltdown. Unfortunately for me, this is the drive that has, or rather had, most of my content. I'll be checking with the good folks at Texas Wesleyan's IT department to see if anything can be recovered--I hope; I hope.
• GimpShop provides a toned down, free version of Photoshop, so for those of you who can't afford Photoshop, download the software and play.
• Audacity also provides free audio software. Just download the software, and you can edit digital recordings, add effects, etc. before associating the ditigal recording with a slideshow.

I'll offer more tips that I've gleaned from Newsplex throughout my two weeks of training, so stay tuned.

Flash Animation Exercise from Newsplex

This is my final Newsplex post for this week--a brief Flash animation that we created. Now I'm off to Charleston.