Melissa Wantz: Notes from West Egg

I’ve been given the opportunity to present what we do with web 2.0 technology in journalism class at a conference at MIT titled Media Literacy and 21st Century Skills.

I’ll be leaving a week from Friday for Boston and have been asked to boil down what we do at our school news site to a one-minute video that we’ll upload to Youtube and package together with the rest of the panel into an introduction of sorts.

The others on the panel are most impressive, and to tell you the truth, I don’t really feel like I have the experience or knowledge to be more than a member of the audience. Nevertheless, I’ve been invited and I’m really looking forward to getting to hear from some brilliant practitioners of media, media literacy and technology education.

I wrote a script for what I would like to put together for our video. I want to show all of the free technologies that we use to produce the school news site, which launched about 10 days ago. It’s impossible to demonstrate so many technologies in a minute, so my students will hold up hand-written signs with the names of the products we incorporate into the production and marketing of the site. (I wonder how many commercial news organizations use these, or if they rely on expensive quick-to-date special software, the way our school district does for certain programs).

With no budget, no sponsorships yet (save one small one), free is great. It occurs to me that when I began this blog 16 months ago, the only one on this list I’d ever used was Gmail. What will I know 16 months from now? What will I be teaching?

Here’s the list:

Joomla! a content management system that is slick, flexible and pretty complicated to learn for a newbie like me. But I did it.

Photoshop.com: we use this to edit photos before uploading to a central storage site

Picasa: our Google-based storage site for photos waiting to be uploaded to joomla

Flickr: this is where we search for Creative Commons-licensed photos when we can’t or didn’t get a local one for a story.

Freepixels.com: another place to search for photos licensed to be used.

Skype: I am in the process of planning Skype collaboration with three journalism teachers from across the country who I “met” on the JEA listserv. We want to have our staffs video conference and use each other as national correspondents on a few stories. This will hopefully be in place prior to the MIT conference, or shortly upon my return from our Fall Break, the last week in October.

Google Docs: We have e-forms on our site built on Google docs. One of them allows sponsors to sign up for a level of sponsorship. Another allows readers/viewers to suggest stories for us to cover. We also started off the year using Google docs as an editing vehicle. Students would upload their story and share it as a link with their editors (a section editor, copy editor, editor-in-chief and myself) through a four-step process. It sounded good in theory but ultimately (after only a week) I had to drop it because a) kids don’t check their emails regularly and b) I could never tell where the story was in the chain. This might have worked for a print publication that goes out once a month or every few weeks. For a daily news operation, I learned it’s critical (or at least very nice) to have the content loaded into one place and have the editors come to it. Thus, the students now upload their stories directly into joomla, into a special “needs editing” category, where they await the editors.

Clustrmaps: this is a neat little hit counter that puts a red dot on a world map every time someone clicks on the site for the first time. The dots get bigger the more unique hits from any one area. Last week, we got Brazil, South Africa and The Philippines. We have a map of the world on our wall and are putting a pin in it to match the Clustrmap.

Mail Chimp: we are going to be offering an email digest version of our news site to anyone who signs up for it. This will be another way of reaching out and getting our news into “their space.” We will have links to certain stories and videos and each email will also carry the names and links to our top Platinum sponsors for one year. Mail Chimp makes the email auto response and organization very easy.

Google Sites: we use this wiki program as a place to store some documents, such as the handbook and the local style guide that we are very slowly developing. I also foresee it as a place for students to build their portfolios of published work. But that will have to be implemented a bit later.

Ning: We have a class ning page where I place non-deadline assignments. For example, I might ask the students to read a certain article and state why it is so good, so readable or interesting. There are video lessons (TED talks, etc…) on the site, photos from field trips, links to other places.

Twitter: We use Twitter to reach out offsite and we also stream our Facebook fan page updates to Twitter on the front page of our site because Twitter is not blocked at school, while Facebook is (why the difference? No idea. Maybe the district thinks no one could be harmed in 140 characters.)

Gmail: We have an account for the news site. Gmail is great because you can label emails with different colors and titles and the search feature is amazingly fast.

Facebook: We post teasers and links once a day, in the evenings, to stories that we just posted up on the site. We have 410 fans today. (Our school is 900 students).

Jing: I used this video component to make a 2-minute video screen capture of our news site for Back to School night. We had a booth in the quad but our school doesn’t have wireless except in the cafeteria, so I had the kids play the video loop to show parents. This was our launch day, so it was important marketing to give people a visual sense of what we were all about. The problem with jing is I can’t figure out a way to export files. I may have to pony up $30 or so for a commercial version.

Photo Credit: Creative Commons-licensed “Web Refractions” by ecstaticist on Flickr.