Teaching Interactive Digital Media

During the Spring semester of 2017, I was hired to teach a course in Interactive Digital Media at Wake Forest University. This was the first time I had taught a college class that was all my own. There were 15 journalism minors in the class and all of them were girls.

The class was about digital media use in journalistic style stories. I’m not a journalist but I know a few things about digital media. I taught some fundamentals of photoshop, digital audio, video, and tools for creating interactive web media, like Knight Lab and Wordpress. For the final project each student created a story. Here are a few of their projects:

• Winston-Salem’s Food Insecurity Dilemma
• UpDog Kombucha: WFU Student Entrepreneurs’ Health Drink Is An Instant Success
• At Wake Forest University, Latin Isn’t Dead. It’s Immortal.
• I man-spreaded everywhere for a week and I’ve never felt more confident
• Wise Man Brews Change in Downtown Winston-Salem

When it came time to assign class grades I had mixed feelings. Some students had worked harder than others. Some were better at certain things or had more experience. And since this was the first college class I had ever taught I wanted to show the people who hired me that I was a good, strict teacher.

But on the other hand, I knew this would probably be the last college class I would ever teach. And I have a low opinion of the value of letter grades. So I decided to give everyone an A, whether they deserved it or not. Also, on the last day of class we mostly just ate chocolate.