Although summer might be a distant vision for those still shoveling out from recent snowstorms, the time is now for students to start planning which summer journalism workshops they will attend.

Thousands of students from across the country will extend their learning into the summer months by attending workshops sponsored by a variety of scholastic journalism groups.

The North Carolina Scholastic Media Association, like many state groups, hosts a summer institute for high school students that provides training in print, online, broadcast and social media. Monica Hill, the director of NCSMA, said summer workshops can provide more than just instruction, however.

“It’s a terrific opportunity for networking,” Hill said.

The hundreds of students who attend NCSMA’s institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill work collaboratively to produce a newspaper, website and TV broadcast covering the event.

Media Now STL, a four-day summer camp housed at Maryville University in St. Louis, Missouri, features an emphasis on digital media.

Aaron Manfull is the digital media chair for the Journalism Education Association and serves as an instructor at the camp.

“We call Media Now STL a digital bootcamp because we work very hard to make sure each class has a digital component infused,” Manfull said. “Whether it’s in the yearbook course where we work with staffs to promote expanded online coverage in the print product to the photo courses where we give photographers best practices on sharing their galleries and stories socially to reach a large audience, we want to make sure each student in every class recognizes the important role the digital sphere plays in every facet of journalism today.”

Now in its fifth year, the camp has grown from three to 15 courses offered for students and advisers. New workshops for this year are Sports Journalism, Design: InDesign and Social Media.

“While I’m really excited that we are offering a Social Media class for the first time, I’m probably most excited to see the work the Mobile Video and Live Broadcasting class is going to be doing,” Manfull said. Live broadcasting of high school events has seen immense growth in the past year.

Registration for Media Now STL closes June 12, 2015.

Other workshops, such as Newsroom by the Bay at Standford University, attract students nationwide.

Beatrice Motamedi, a co-director of Newsroom by the Bay and the California state director of the Journalism Education Association, said the program this summer will draw on new trends in design thinking and digital media, along with one-to-one iPad reporting, intensive training in multimedia skills, and real-life reporting opportunities in Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

As in previous years, students will work collaboratively in teams to create their own WordPress websites.

“Student-led publishing through intensive teamwork with mentoring by seasoned journalism advisers and working professionals, plus opportunities to visit and report in such places as San Francisco’s AT&T Park, is the heart of this program and the reason for its strong student testimonials,” Motamedi said.

For a list of these and other summer camps, visit the workshops page at SchoolJournalism.org.