BBC News School Report Practice Day

Year 7 Review of the BBC School Report Day 2013

So far, we have found that the BBC School Report is extremely interesting, because we can find out what it is like to be a reporter for the BBC. Being a journalist is enormous fun, but it is sometimes hard to find a good story.

To start off with, we had an introduction to journalism with Simon Cleminson, a reporter on BBC Spotlight. He told us a made up story about kids that got better grades by sleeping at school, and we then summed it all up into a single short sentence. Then we went over to IT5 and started our reports.

We started thinking about what our main topic was going to be for our news headline. In the end we decided to do a serious topic called Down syndrome. Down syndrome is a learning disability that you are born with.

The title for our topic is “Down syndrome… what it’s all about”

The reason we did Down syndrome as our topic was because World Down Syndrome Day is on the same day as our real report date, the 21st of March.

We did a reasonable amount of research before we went off to interview people. We started to get our video ready by re watching our videos and making sure they were ready to put onto Windows Movie Maker. As we are writing this, our videos are being uploaded onto the computer to be made into a movie and edited.

By Jake, Murdo and Chris

Our Mentoring Experience 

Today’s mentoring experience was great as it meant we could help people who’d never done it before. It was fun to be more involved with the technical behind the scenes side of things instead of being the ones writing and presenting articles.

We got to do a new range of things, like organising the group. This involved sending emails, arranging interviews, and filming some of the reports. Furthermore, we got to advise them on different techniques that we had learned over the years of our involvement. The day was full of many challenges to overcome, such as: deleting video clips from the cameras; computers crashing due to the programs we were using and computers not uploading the videos. These problems are only minor difficulties that occur every year, and can be easily solved.

To help us with the day Simon Clements, a reporter from BBC Spotlight News came to help us. He taught us how to film good shots, and how to put together an article so it runs smoothly. It was a big help to have someone with lots of experience in the field to help us and give us trustworthy, professional advice.

We were glad to be part of the entire day, as it’s a great experience for an insight into the world of news and the media. The day as a whole was successful seeing as it was only a practice day, and the real day will be even better now that everyone has had this experience.

By Alice Purdy and Toby Goodwin