Category Archives: Classroom Activities and Exercises

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Looking for social media class assignments, activities, and exercises?

Cool! I’ve got you covered.

See all of my blog posts that contain social media class assignments, activities, and exercises. Just scroll down to access them. These are great public relations class assignments and work well as marketing class assignments, too. Enjoy!

Like comprehensive plans that are super-organized? Check out my book, Teach Social Media: A Plan for Creating a Course Your Students Will Love, that contains a semester’s worth of social media class exercises, assignments and activities.

Classroom Activities and Exercises, Social Media, Teaching Social Media

The IGTV Video Class Assignment: Review and Tips

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This page may contain affiliate links, meaning at no additional cost to you, if you click a link and make a purchase, I will make a commission. Please read my disclosure for details.

The IGTV Video Class Assignment

How can we get our students learning and doing more with video? IGTV videos – or Instagram TV videos – is one such way.  That’s why I had my social media class create an IGTV video show this past fall. In the below post, I share how I set the IGTV class assignment up, link to examples of student work, and discuss key takeaways and considerations.

Continue reading The IGTV Video Class Assignment: Review and Tips →

Classes, Classroom Activities and Exercises, Strategic Campaigns

Use this Worksheet in Your Class to Design a Message Map and Key Messages for a Communication Campaign (Part 2 of 2)

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Teaching Students to Develop Message Maps

In the first post in this series I provided an activity to teach students what key messages are and how they can begin learning to identify and extract key messages. If you haven’t read it, please do so before proceeding.

Below, students take the brainstorm activity and go out and get some feedback for their key messages. Then, they develop a message map.

Continue reading Use this Worksheet in Your Class to Design a Message Map and Key Messages for a Communication Campaign (Part 2 of 2) →

Classes, Classroom Activities and Exercises, Strategic Campaigns

How to Teach Key Messages to PR and Marketing Students: Activity Included (Part 1 of 2)

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This post may contain affiliate links, meaning at no additional cost to you, if you click a link and make a purchase, I will make a commission. Please read my disclosure for details.

Teaching Students to Develop Key Messages is a Great Public Relations Class Activity

As a kid, I paid more attention to the lyrics than the rhythm or the beat. I also probably spent more time thinking about how authors expressed the ideas in a story than the story itself.

Maybe that’s why messaging is one aspect of brand building and campaign planning that has always fascinated me. While people often find the process of building key messages tedious, I see it as the fun kind of tedious.

This is part 1 of a two-part series on how I teach students to develop key messages and build a message map in my Strategic Campaign class.

Continue reading How to Teach Key Messages to PR and Marketing Students: Activity Included (Part 1 of 2) →

Activities and Events, Classroom Activities and Exercises, Teaching Social Media

My New Book, Teach Social Media: A Plan for Creating a Course Your Students Will Love, is Now Available on Amazon!

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Teach Social Media Book

I am beyond thrilled to announce that my new book, Teach Social Media: A Plan for Creating a Course Your Students Will Love, is now available on Amazon in paperback and eBook formats.

It has been a long and exciting journey. I am so glad to finally be able to share this project with you. It is one of my most ambitious undertakings. I can best describe it as an organized “brain dump” of my knowledge about teaching a social media class for students interested in careers as professional communicators (e.g., public relations, marketing).

Continue reading My New Book, Teach Social Media: A Plan for Creating a Course Your Students Will Love, is Now Available on Amazon! →

Classes, Classroom Activities and Exercises, Writing Across Platforms

Practice writing news headlines and news leads: Re-write the headline and lead of a news story by focusing on the most interesting part [in-class activity]

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News Headline Writing and Lead Writing Practice Exercise

News headlines – or the titles of news stories – and news leads are vital parts of a compelling news story or news release.

But, what makes for an interesting story? That’s an important question and if we are going to prepare our students to be professional communicators, we should be having this conversation with our students in many of our classes.

Continue reading Practice writing news headlines and news leads: Re-write the headline and lead of a news story by focusing on the most interesting part [in-class activity] →

Classes, Classroom Activities and Exercises, Strategic Campaigns

What’s Changing? Creative Briefs and Using Story Arcs in Pitch Presentations

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It’s that time of year. The tradition must continue! It is time, of course, for my ‘What’s Changing’ blog post to start off the semester. I’ve been writing these posts for years as a way to highlight key changes I have in mind for the semester ahead. For example, here’s last semester’s post.

Continue reading What’s Changing? Creative Briefs and Using Story Arcs in Pitch Presentations →

Classroom Activities and Exercises, Communication Research

Communication Research Class Media Placement Assignment, Part 2: Doing Data Entry and Creating a Data Legend

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Communication Research Class Assignment Review

This post is long overdue (I feel like I say that a lot!).

It is a follow up to a post I published in January titled “Here’s my communication research class assignment on analyzing media placement.”  Recently, I received a public comment on that post from a professor I greatly admire, Kelli Burns, pointing out that project assignment (see the bottom of this post for that document) notes at the bottom of the document that additional work will be assigned the following day. But, I never discuss what that entails in the blog post.  I apologize to everyone who read that post because, in that sense, it was incomplete in terms of explaining the project.

Thank you to Dr. Burns for bringing this to my attention. With this in mind, I’ve decided to do a much-delayed follow up post, turning that initial post into a two-part series.

Continue reading Communication Research Class Media Placement Assignment, Part 2: Doing Data Entry and Creating a Data Legend →