Taking your school newspaper online

Well look at that! We got a snow day today. We probably got about 7" total yesterday, but not all of it stuck to the ground. However, all the rural districts canceled today, which I am thankful for because driving country roads in those conditions is Not. Fun.

As much as I loved the surprise day off, this is NOT what spring should look like:

view from my front window

So while I am sitting at home today, I thought I would write a post I have wanted to tackle for awhile, which is about bringing our school newspaper into the 21st century and taking it online. Below I'll outline how I chose our host site, tips and tricks for bringing your school newspaper online, and how to combat possible issues with doing so.

You can also read my first post about organizing a journalism class here.

How I chose our host site:
There are different websites out there that will host a school paper. One common site that is free is hsj.org, which is a high school journalism organization. I have nothing against this organization and think it is great, but their options for bringing your paper online were limited. We didn't have as much freedom, as many layouts to choose from, and it overall didn't look as professional.

After literally just Googling "high school online newspapers," I found School Newspapers Online  
This website hosts newspapers from elementary schools through colleges and even some professional organization newspapers. I browsed through their clients list and looked at some local papers that used this host website and loved what I saw. 

SNO lets you choose from about 6 different possible layouts, you can add a plethora of widgets for free including a calendar, sports score scroll, polls, videos, photo slideshows, etc. You really can customize this website exactly how you like it, and it is so user-friendly.

The cost is $600/year for the first year and $300 after that. You can choose your own URL (ours is is our school paper name.org). You tell them what tabs you want at the top of the page, what colors you want to use, etc., and they have it set up for you within a couple days. Any time I have questions or issues, I get a response within an hour or two from their tech help team.

In order to publish an article, you just copy and paste the body into a text box, click a button to upload a pic with it, type in author's name and hit "publish." It is that simple, and it's exactly what I was looking for.

*P.S. I am in no way, shape, or form getting paid by SNO, nor do I work for them. Just wanted to share a site that worked for us.

Tips and Tricks for online Journalism

1. Survey students, teachers, community members, etc. to get a feel for interest.
We had normally put out one paper copy of the newspaper per month and it got circulated during homeroom. We knew kids read it because many times, teachers would use this as their homeroom activity for the week and distribute the papers for kids to read. I was concerned that we would lose readership by taking the paper completely online, when kids would have to choose to go to that site in their free time or during study hall.

After researching a possible host site, I brought it up with my staff. They all loved the idea. Then we surveyed some random students in study halls, and I talked it over with our principal. The response was overwhelmingly positive. This made me feel more confident about moving forward with this endeavor.

2. Promote, promote, promote!

We had to get the word out about our new site. I waited until we had had it for about two weeks and had a couple weeks' worth of articles uploaded, so there was content to read. Then I ran a school announcement in the morning announcements for three days, highlighting what types of articles we were running, what students might be interested in, etc.

I made colorful flyers with our new address on it and posted 20 copies around the school, including in the teacher's lounge and mail room, so staff got interested too.

We sent out a Skylert email to parents of students in the district (automated e-mail through Skyward) with the new address and highlighting interesting content. I get a Google analytics e-mailed to me each Monday showing the hits to our site every week. The day that e-mail was sent out, we had over 100 hits. It went out on a Friday and that entire weekend we were getting over 50 hits per day. On a normal day, we may have 15-20 hits.

Every time we have a new feature on our site or a particularly interesting article, I will run it in the morning announcements so students don't forget about checking it out.

3. Have a schedule for uploading content.

I went through this in more detail in my previous post about building a journalism class.  But basically, I have 2-3 students assigned to each day of the week for deadlines on articles. That means we publish at least two new articles each day. My editors are in charge of physically publishing these articles.

I also have to keep up the calendar, polls, sports scores, breaking news ticker, etc. My sports writer is in charge of maintaining the sports scores daily. He also often writes breaking news tickers/articles.

An administrator (me) is the only one who can upload polls. I try to publish a new poll every week and have it tie in with an article we recently wrote. The two most recent polls are displayed at all times on our front page sidebar. I also sit down every month and add new events to our calendar taken straight from our school calendar.

Combating possible issues

1. I'm sure many people are leery of letting students have access to publishing things online. I am too, which is why I only let my two editors and my sports writer have accounts. None of my other students have a log-in to our website. They write articles and find pics, but after I approve them, it goes to an editor to publish. I am also on our site during class time and double check everything that gets uploaded. In the future, I may (depending on the class) let other students have limited accounts (some accounts let them publish their own articles and some accounts let them write on our site but not actually publish).

2. Inappropriate comments.
This was a concern to me, too, but I wanted the option of comments so it could be interactive. This is why I chose a site that allows comment moderation beforehand.

In order to post a comment on our site, you must give a first and last name, plus a valid e-mail address. We do not allow anonymous comments. You must enter a captcha to try and combat spam (although I do get a fair share of spam comments), and then it gets e-mailed to me to moderate. I can post it, spam it, or trash it. This way students (or others) can interact with our articles and comment, but it is controlled, since it's still a school site.

3. Monetary concerns
We get sponsorships from local businesses to offset the costs of running a paper (this has honestly SAVED us so much money! We were paying close to $1600/year to get our paper copies printed).

At the beginning of each school year, we brainstorm a list of local businesses that may sponsor us. From that list, I cross off any that have been rude to us or not sponsored in the past and probably won't or that don't want to be bothered. I assign 3-4 businesses to each group of students (they usually travel in pairs).

The staff goes out to these businesses and we work on how they will approach asking for a sponsorship. We charge $15/month for a business to be located on our "sponsors" page with their company logo and a link to their website. We typically get 10-12 sponsors per school year, which is more than enough to cover our website expenses. In the future, I am also looking into selling advertisements for a little more money, which would be a larger ad that runs on our front page.

 So there you have it. Some tips and advice for transitioning your paper online. Another way to do this a little slower is to have a hybrid paper: publish online but keep paper copies as well. For us, it was more cost-efficient to just go completely online, plus it was eco-friendly. The kids are enjoying it, and I am loving it too. I can't believe how professional it looks! We have gotten nothing but positive comments about it, and I feel like the quality of articles students write have gone up since the move online.

Just as a side note, I wanted to mention a teaching documentary I watched this morning on my snow day that I highly recommend. I have Netflix streaming and am always looking for interesting things to watch.

Today I watched a docu called The American Teacher.

 

It chronicles four teachers through a school year and really gives a true glimpse into the trials and tribulations of being a public school teacher. I loved that it praised teachers, rather than criticized them. It shows the financial difficulties and strain it can put on teachers' families, the time commitment necessary, etc. As a public school teacher myself, I loved it and thought it was spot-on. So if anyone else is enjoying a snow day today, you might check it out!

Organizing a Journalism Class

Well my students and I got our wish today. We have a snow day! I was super nervous about having to commute in this weather, so I was very relieved when I got the call just after 6 this morning. Right now there is a lull in the snow and sleet, but it's supposed to get worse again this afternoon. My day so far has consisted of drinking coffee, watching Netflix, and lounging on the couch with my dog.

Doesn't she have a rough life?

Today while I'm home and pittering around on our new school newspaper online, I thought I'd post about my experience building up our journalism program and give some of my tips for ensuring a smoothly-run paper that is still fun, but productive for kids.

A little background: I was pretty much thrown into being the newspaper adviser (which is a class at my school) 3 years ago with absolutely zero journalism and/or graphic design experience. I had to teach myself InDesign, teach myself about journalism out of our text, and be ready to run with it come August. If I can do it, anyone can!

Mrs. L's Tips for a Journalism Class:
1. Have students apply for the class (if your school allows it).
My first year taking this over, anyone (sophomores and up) could be in this course, and I ended up with a lot of seniors taking it for a "blow off" class and not taking it seriously. Honestly, my first year doing the paper was really, really rough because of it (and because of my lack of experience). So now I have a brief application the students must fill out that isn't so much work it turns them off to the class, but separates the ones who are serious from those who aren't.

It basically asks for their current teacher, grade in school, and then a few short answer questions:

• Why do you want to take journalism?
• What do you hope to get out of the class?
• A short writing sample of a practice news article

I also talk to their teachers about grades, work ethic, teamwork, etc. Each year, there are usually a few who don't make the class because of failing regular classes, poor reviews from teachers, etc. I typically have a newspaper staff of 9-15 kids, which I think is a great size.

2.  Have a clear set of established rules and policies from the get-go, everything from camera usage and checking them out, computer usage (I have 4 Mac computers in my room for journalism), leaving the room procedures, etc.. My students get their own newspaper badge with name and picture that functions as their hall pass during my class. I have 3 different spread sheets to keep track of students and hold them accountable:

-One for computer usage: name, computer #, purpose, and time on and off

-One for checking out cameras (we have 2): name, date, purpose, date returned

-One for leaving the room or building (for interviews, pics, sponsors, etc): Name, destination, time in and out

I find this holds them accountable but is little to no work for me. Win-win.

3. Have a system of organization.

At our paper, we do have an editor or co-editors (typically seniors who have been on the staff before and/or strong writers/organizers) and each student is assigned a beat (A&E, Local News, Opinions, etc.). The process of writing an article from conception to publishing goes like this:

1. Each student has a weekly deadline (they write one story per week, which I find manageable but enough to keep them busy all the time).
2. A week ahead of time (or when they finish prior article), they brainstorm ideas for this week's article. I have them turn in 2-3 ideas to me, and I'll let them know which ones I think will work best.
3. Once approved, they turn in an article plan to me, which is a basic outline of their article, work schedule, interviews, pics, etc.
4.  Each day during that week, they are working on their article and turning in daily progress (I give grades weekly and have a spreadsheet for each day of the week where I record absences, what they worked on, etc).
5. When they are at the point where they have a draft typed up, they give it to the editor. S/he looks at it, makes suggestions, and hands back to author (each student has a mailbox in my room for returning work).
6. The author makes any corrections, turns back in to editor, and this continues until the editor thinks it is ready to publish.
7. At this point, the editor gives me the "final" copy, and I do a once-over. I often times find small errors that need changing, and in that case, it goes back to author to fix. When I give it the stamp of approval (I use the stamp below for this and other assignments in my classes, and the kids LOVE it!), the copy goes to the editor to publish online.

   

   I only use the "Like" stamp at school. Purchased from ThinkGeek.com for $12.99

   
   
8.  Right now, only my editors have an account on our paper's website to publish articles and pics. In the future, I may make contributor accounts for my other staff members so they, too, can upload just their own articles, but for now, I like to have limited access to it (I am an administrator and have more control than editors, who have more control than authors, etc).
9. Students save articles and pics to our file on the computer, so editors can have access to everything when the time comes to publish.
10. Doing it this way, we publish about 3 new articles each day to our website. I also have my sports writer in charge of uploading new sports scores daily and inputting events into our online calendar.

4. Sprinkle in content assignments

We do have a journalism book, and while 90% of our time is spent writing, reporting, and publishing, most of my students have zero journalism background when they get to me. We spend the first few weeks of the school year writing practice articles, working on headlines, interviewing (I have teachers who volunteer to come in on their prep and get "interviewed"), writing leads, taking good pictures, writing captions, discussing journalism ethics, etc. They must know the basics to be able to write halfway decent articles. I hold them to these expectations whenever they write content to be published.

Throughout the year, we will visit other chapters when necessary and revisit concepts they still struggle with (such as writing a good lead). If that means we get one day behind in publishing, so be it. Our quality has to be there.

5. Get the student body interested

When I inherited this paper, it was mostly for teachers and adults in the community to read (it was distributed in the local paper as well). Our students weren't that interested. So we brainstormed and found a couple ways to get our student body more interested in reading:

-We started an advice column. I put a box in the library where students can anonymously submit advice questions (of course, I have to weed through some inappropriate ones always!), and each month or week we run one question with an answer from our staff.

-We've started a "Guess the Teacher" competition. Each month we interview a different teacher and post their answers online. I collect answers in my room and draw for the winner. The winning student gets a $20 gift card to any local business. This drums up interest in reading and also benefits our community.

-We are in the beginning stages of setting up a FB page for our paper. I will be the one running it (which I would HIGHLY recommend-don't let a student do this), where we will link to new articles published online. If you can garner interest and get student "likes," you can even run contests through FB, and they will always know when new articles are published. I'll report back when this is up and running for a little while to evaluate how beneficial it is.

Running a student newspaper can be a LOT of work, but I think it's worth it. It is enjoyable for the kids, they get real-world writing skills for a true audience, and it is great practice for those students wanting to pursue journalism or communication. I also think it helps drum up school spirit to report on school events, highlight students doing awesome things, and it also may be the only current events our students get, since we do cover local, national, and international news as well.

It can be overwhelming, especially if you're a journalism novice like me, but if I can do it, so can you! Within three years, I would say I have built up the program, gotten students more interested in it, made it more current by taking it online and made it more selective by requiring an application.

Sorry this post got so long-I tried to keep it brief. If you've got other questions about journalism classes/programs, feel free to leave a comment. I also plan to do another post that focuses just on online journalism, how I decided to go online, how I decided which site to use to host us, and problems/solutions to online journalism in a HS classroom.

Technology in a not Smart classroom

Browsing other teaching blogs, I get so envious of everyone who has any technology they could want at their fingertips. I don't have a Smart board in my classroom, and we don't have laptops for every kid. Those things will hopefully appear down the line, but in the meantime, how do you incorporate some technology into lesson plans?

I try to use it whenever possible and have so many different things I try, but below are some of my favorites and most common uses.

For one, I have my College English student use a Wikispace page. 
It's basically like a class blog or message board, similar to Blackboard that many colleges use. I will post announcements, assignments, and hand outs on there, as well as host different discussion threads they have to respond to.

For instance, they may post a paper proposal and have their peers comment on it. I have also started doing online peer reviews with them where they post their rough draft to a thread and their peer reviewers write them a peer review memo and post it as a reply. It's easy for me to grade then because I can open up the post and see the original paper with both memos right below it. They enjoy doing things electronically as well.

This is the first year we have taken the school newspaper online (VERY new in fact, as we just transitioned last week), and after browsing online for hosting options, we settled on School Newspapers Online. This site is run by two high school newspaper advisers and is extremely user-friendly, which I wanted since this is an English class, and most of us don't have graphic design background. I have a very limited knowledge of HTML from a Grad school course I took and have no interest in revisiting that! Yikes.

It is $600/year for the first year and then $300/year for subsequent years, which is about $1000 cheaper than getting our paper printed in hard copy through the local city newspaper. This way we can also update content daily and run more up-to-date news stories instead of putting out an actual paper monthly.

For my sophomores, I wanted to try taking an assignment online that I did before. In the past, I would type up a handout that resembled a Facebook profile and have the kids make a FB profile for a literary character from a book we were studying or an author we read. It was fun, but I wanted something more interactive and more FB-like, without actually being on Facebook.

Enter Fakebook!
It looks almost like a real Facebook page and is interactive. If you type in a famous person's name, like Shakespeare, their picture will even pop up from Fakebook's database. You can add other famous friends, like statuses, post statuses, post pictures, videos, etc. and comment on others' statuses. I had my sophomores do this for Santiago from The Old Man and the Sea last fall and they had a blast with it! So much better than doing it on paper.

These are just a few ways I try to incorporate technology into my classroom, though there are many others. I will try to have one post each week where I highlight technology or online resources I bring into my class.

Does anyone have other ideas for a non-technology/non-Smart classroom?