New Media training for Matara journalists
Internews, through its partner organization Perambara, organized a training in Matara on new media. Thirteen young journalists learned web basics, email, blogging, uploading pictures to flikr, and using social networking sites like twitter. The training was conducted using a hands on, live, and interactive training methodology.
On the first day, trainees created email accounts on Gmail, as some had never before created personal email accounts. The participants then received help in designing blogs on Wordpress, and added their first blog post, including tags and categories.
They were then shown how to add pictures onto their blog.
Participants were also introduces to several methods of typing Sinhala in Unicode, including different keyboard layouts, browser extensions, and transliteration codecs.
Training on the second day was conducted on how to create a flickr account, and uploading their first photograph onto flickr. A short discussion was held about the ethics and methods of using digital photography on the web, and how to find and use public domain images.
They were then introduced to Twitter, as a social networking and microblogging platform. Trainees signed up for a twitter account, were taught on @replies, hashtags, direct messages, and URL shortening for tweeting. Trainees were also introduced to tweeting via SMS, and shows how to subscribe for SMS twitter alerts.
Participants learned how to embed YouTube videos onto their blog posts, customize their blogs, and how to use widgets. Even the training evaluation was completed by participants online hosted on Google Documents.
