Any subject could use a real-time simulation of a newsroom to consolidate understanding of events - natural disasters in geography, big events in history. Making the simulation work is easy if you prepare your material as a PowerPoint presentation, including images, sound and video clips as well as text, and then use the “slide transition timing” feature to deliver your content in “real time”. Students in editorial groups can monitor, order and select from the incoming flow of information to write accounts of events, changing them as new material appears.

Editorial writing can be made more exciting and convincing by using real news content. Find it online at www.reuters.com or newspapers (www.timesonline.co.uk).

Students can work in teams to assemble a front page, deciding on format - tabloid, broadsheet, daily or sunday, local or national, and making and justifying decisions about appropriateness for readership, bias etc. The final version doesn’t have to be print: it could be a web page or a multimedia presentation.