AGRICULTURAL COMMUNICATIONS

Welcome to the 2008 Career Development Events Contest Homepages! On each of these contest homepages, you will find the contest guidelines, the contest superintendent and eventually pictures and results! If you have specific questions about this contest, please contact the contest superintendent. If you have general questions about the Career Development Events, please contact the general CDE Superintendent or the State FFA Office.

The links below lead to the contest guidelines. The link on the top leads to a PDF file. This file requires that your browser have a special plug-in - Adobe Acrobat Reader - which is free. If you do not have this plugin, click on the Adobe Acrobat box below, and it will take you to the site where you may download the plugin. The link on the bottom leads to a Microsoft Word Document. If you are unable to download either of these files, please contact the General CDE Superintendent at amy.simmons@okstate.edu. Please note: We will post the most current version of contest guidelines as they are made available to us. If the guidelines are not available, please contact the contest superintendent!

Click HERE for contest guidelines in .pdf format.

Click HERE for contest guidelines in .doc format.

National FFA's handbook for the AGCM CDE is what we use to write the exam, and it reviews the practicum areas. Additional resources are the Associated Press Stylebook and Working With Words, both of which should be available online (purchase spiral-bound if you can; they're more functional). We have some sample items on a Web site (http://aged.okstate.edu/cde/ffa1.htm), and you can take newspaper stories (magazine are too long) from the Web, put in errors, and have the students find them.

The writing practicum participants should read good newspapers as much as possible to learn the journalistic writing style; the broadcaster should listen to the Radio Oklahoma Network (Ron Hays) and other farm broadcasters to get a feel for how news is not like an FFA speech. Graphics folks can practice with their own pics and facts you can find from USDA, Ag Statistics, etc. for information graphics.

Advisors - Contact the contest superintendent for answer keys to practice tests