Iowa Stories & Lived Experiences (ISLE) is an intensive two-week multimedia workshop offered in the summer that gives students real-world experience in collaborative journalism. The immersive format of the workshop allows students to focus their energy on one project while producing portfolio-quality work. During the first week of the workshop, students are embedded in a select Iowa community to document its stories and explore its connection to a central theme. The second week of the workshop is spent in production as students edit, collect data and build upon their visual storytelling skills. Projects incorporate photography, video, audio, emerging media, and data visualizations, culminating in a final screening of student work.