CCHS Journalism Classes Releases Mobile Phone Application

The Cathedral City High School digital storytelling class has released a mobile phone application available on iTunes and the Android Market.

Search CCNews to download the application.

The application was built by Zane Allyn and Nick Bolland of the IT Department of the Desert Sun, our partner in this project.
Here's where you will find the latest news on what's happening:

http://digitalnatives.net/ccnews/

The Changing Landscape of the News Business

While acknowledging that the traditional newspaper is rapidly vanishing, Desert Sun Executive Editor Greg Burton (left) told students Wednesday morning that "The core of this business will be the story. It was that way fifty years ago, and it will be that way 50 years from now."

Burton and Desert Sun digital reporter Brian Indrelunas (middle) were dialoguing with Matt Hamilton's journalism students about social media intersecting with traditional reporting and the opportunity and responsibility reporters hold in their hand.

"Our industry has really changed in the last decade," Burton said. "When I was a young reporter 10 or 15 years ago, we came into a news room and it wasn't wired like this," he said, pointing to banks of networked computers. "We sat down and talked about the news that was going on and set our timing for our deadlines for the monstrosity of a printing press out back. Everybody was focused on the getting the best story to put on the spools of paper that would be printed and delivered by the next morning at 6 a.m.

"Today, if you are waiting for that 6 a.m. paper on your doorstep to get your information, you're the last one to know what is going on."

Indrelunas is one example of a modern newsgatherer, spending some his time scouring Facebook and Twitter and other social media for trending stories.

"Instead of waiting for a 20-inch story to be written, processed, and edited 15 times, sometimes we only need a headline on our web site. And as we get details, we can keep expanding that story all day."

Burton called Inderlunas "the new model of what our industry has become."

The Desert Sun web site gets 200,000 hits daily.

Filmmakers in the Classroom Series Begins at CCHS

Playwright John Steppling (right) and Education Outreach Director Ken Jacobson kicked off the Filmmakers in the Classroom series in Matt Hamilton's Digital Storytelling Class at Cathedral City High School Friday morning.

As Steppling explained at the beginning of class, one of the purposes of the series is to help the students develop a critical vocabulary and learn how to analyze a film. "Art tends to ask questions," Steppling said in his introduction. "You don't have to answer those questions. The most important questions are those that can't be answered."

Digital Storytelling is just one course offered in the Digital Arts Technology Academy at CCHS.

After watching the opening of "The Killers," Steppling and Jacobson engaged the students in discussion of what they observed. "Film is a pervasive, ubiquitous art form, an all pervasive medium and an important one" Steppling said. "You add up all the hours of narrative, thousands of hours, and it's hard to create something that stands out from the tsunami of film of film."

The idea for this series, which will occur twice a month, resulted from a meeting Hamilton, Jacobson and Steppling set up during the summer.

"The Palm Springs Film Festival is interested in engaging the future filmmakers in our community, and my students are excited to have people who have been intimately involved in film share their experiences and expertise," said Hamilton

DATA Senior Party

The DATA senior party is a chance for DATA students and teachers to get together for one last time as an Academy. This year's party was held June 2, the last school day for seniors. DATA will graduate 43 students on June 8 when CCHS holds its graduation ceremonies on the Lions football field.
At the party, seniors were feted with a poem from DATA sophomore and junior English teacher Nancy Blair, received their sashes and certificates, and gorged on pizza and ice cream.

He's Graduating and Mom's Being Deported

Many seniors look forward with nervousness to the trappings of high school graduation. It's a time of hope and uncertainty.
Cathedral City High School senior Fidel Correa is no exception, although he has a heightened sense of uncertainty.
The day after graduation, Fidel's mother, Maria, will be deported to Mexico to join Fidel's father, also named Fidel, who was taken away from their home in handcuffs by the INS on Feb. 28 and sent back to Tijuana on a bus.
"Most of the time I feel hopeless," said the 17-year-old senior who was born in the United States. "I can't control what is going on. Already I have changed my plans from going to Cal-State Long Beach and Cal-Poly Pomona, where I have been accepted. Instead, I'll be going to College of the Desert next year. Money is an even bigger issue now."
He carried a 4.2 grade point average going into this, his senior year. "My grades dropped since my Dad's arrest," said Fidel Jr., a student in the Digital Arts Technology Academy at CCHS. "I almost dropped out of school a couple times. I started seeing a psychologist, I was and continue to be treated for high blood pressure, and then my Mom miscarried at the end of April."
Fidel's parents came here illegally about 17 years ago, and have spent the past 14 years going through the permanent residency proceedings. "In 2005 when I was in eighth grade, we went before a judge who denied our case," said the CCHS student. "We began the appeal process, called stay of removal, which allowed my parents to stay in the United States."
"You always fell a sense of apprehension. My Dad was hesitant about making decisions. He turned down an opportunity to become a manager because he didn't know how long he would be allowed to stay in the U.S."
One of the options is to turn over guardianship to an uncle until Fidel turns 18 in October. The uncle would be the guardian for both Fidel and his younger brother who is 14.
Money has been transferred to Fidel's name, and he is suddenly responsible for paying the bills. Because of his father's loss of income, they have missed mortgage payments, and are trying to short sell their house.
Fidel Correa Sr. always stressed the value of education to his son. It would have been his proudest moment to see his son walk across the stage and accept his high school diploma.
Now, with his father exiled across the border and his mother ordered to join him less than 24 hours after her son graduates, June eighth will be a bittersweet moment for Fidel Correa Jr., caught in the crossfire of immigration.

DATA Students Spend The Day At UC Riverside

A campus tour, a question and answer with two playwrights, stories of challenges and success by students from two Chicano organizations, and some insight into video games and literacy by an associate professor of media and cultural studies were all on the menu Monday, May 23 when 52 Digital Arts Technology Academy sophomores and juniors spent the day at UC Riverside.

The day for the Cathedral City High School students was organized by UCR's Tony Lawrence and began with a campus tour followed later that morning by a meeting with an admissions counselor.

Playwright and UCR Professor Stu Krieger (The Land Before Time and ten original movies for the Disney Channel, including Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century and its two sequels, Tru Confessions, Smart House and Cow Belles are among his credits. He has been a story editor and writer on Spielberg’s Amazing Stories and the supervising producer on the ABC Television series Jack’s Place) told the students about his early days hustling any job he could find to be near the entertainment industry.

Associate professor Rickerby Hinds, a leading innovator in hip hop theater, talked about his recent work "Dreamscape," an interpretation of a true event based on the story of a young black women in Riverside, passed out in her car with a gun on her lap who ended up shot to death by police.

Hinds said he wrote the play from the point of view of the woman as the protagonist and the coroner as antagonist.

Later in the day, Media and Cultural Studies Associate Professor Derek Burrill talked to the DATA students about the prime importance of narrative in video games. The trip ended with a visit to the California Museum of Photography.

DATA students visit Gnomon School of Visual Effects

Over 100 eighth and ninth graders participated in a field trip to the Gnomon School of Visual Effects on Friday. The trip to the Hollywood school was sponsored by the Digital Arts Technology Academy at Cathedral City High School.

Chances are if you've seen a cool visual effect at the movies, a Gnomon graduate had a hand in it.
And what was one of the most important things those students learned? Well, all that high-tech magic is rooted in some very old fine arts.

DATA students visit Gnomon School of Visual Effects from Matt Hamilton on Vimeo.