Despite tough competition among a record 85 entries, David Cuillier, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, claimed the grand prize at this year’s Great Ideas for Teachers poster fair Wednesday.

Cuillier designed a poster with colorful graphics, calling it “Finding That Dream House Without FOI Nightmares.” His approach can be used to help students access public records, he said.

“My project is about making access relevant to students’ lives,” Cuillier said, “and helping students see it’s not just theoretical.”

Cuillier said the project is a group exercise he uses in the classroom. He asks each group to use public records and word-of-mouth information – no Internet allowed – to decide whether to purchase a particular home and to look up property values and sales and other real estate data. Much of this information is readily available in city and county offices.

Cuillier also encourages students to look for public records about local school test scores, property taxes and zoning requirements. By the end of the semester, Cuillier said, they can see the relevance of using all sorts of public records.

Now in its sixth year, GIFT is an educational competition sponsored by the Community College Journalism Association, Small Programs Interest Group, Scholastic Journalism and the International Communication divisions of AEJMC.

Other 2006 GIFT projects included “[poking] into your instructor’s past” and getting students to use “the right sides of their brains” when dealing with statistics and engaging students during large lecture classes.

Cristina Azocar, director of the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism at San Francisco State University, submitted the “Changing Your Local Newscast” project. She said her classes at SF State spent nearly 30 hours monitoring and analyzing CBS-5 news content for its diversity.

The result: “CBS learned a lot about their newscasts from students’ work,” Azocar said. “They actually made changes to their news gathering techniques.”

Judges selected 25 instructors to make posters of their unique teaching ideas, said GIFT founder Edna Bautista, the newspaper adviser at Benedictine University in Illinois.

Instructors hang their ideas on bulletin boards at the AEJMC poster fair, and judges select one scholar to win a plaque and a $100 check.

“We wanted to share teaching techniques with people,” Bautista said. “This is one of the biggest teaching sessions, and it’s grown.”

This year’s 85 GIFT program applicants surpassed the 50 to 60 professors in recent years.

The top 25 ideas were compiled into a book, which is available for $10 at the AEJMC conference. In 2004 and 2005, Carol Schwalbe, an assistant professor at Arizona State University, won the GIFT contest.