For the past five months the Transition Year Journalism Class in Donabate Community College have been hard at work creating a media outlet for all things TY. They’ve created a Youtube channel, set up a twitter feed, created a website and built up an audience. So when representatives from Google came to the school on Wednesday the 27th of January, Ms. Lowry the Journalism Teacher wanted to make sure Google saw the efforts of the Journalism class.
In order to best show off what the group had created, Ms Lowry asked some of the Journalism students to come in and present to the visitors. With the TY’s being on work experience that day only a handful of students could make it in. Anna O’Reilly, Claire Creedon, James Byrne and Sadhbh Nevins were delighted to be able to avail of this opportunity.
Our visitors, Elijah Lawal (the User Safer Manager for Europe within Google’s Product Quality team) and Oisin Scollard (the Child Safety Program Manager in Google’s Product Quality Team.) were shown each of the three platforms by the students, who enthusiastically discussed their work and explained the project. Oisin and Elijah were very impressed by the editing of videos and work they had put into the Youtube and talked about the technologies such as tagging on Youtube and maximising their search engine optimisation . They were equally impressed by the quality of the website and the knowledge, enthusiasm and talent of the TY Journalism group.
Following an interested and animated discussion the students then said goodbye, but not without first taking a picture in true Journalism style!
The students felt very pleased with how the conversation went and were excited by possible prospects of meeting with Google in the future.
A big thank you to Elijah and Oisin for coming in to meet the TY students and also to Ms Lowry for organising it.
By Claire Creedon
