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.

Tomorrow is the big day. Our news site launches for the first time with real content: articles, video, photos, polls, Twitter, Facebook, commenting, article ratings, etc… Yesterday I worked from 7:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. and today has been the same. It’s been a race to the finish with stories coming in at the last second and photos frantically being shot, edited and uploaded. The kids operate in the “nearly now” and it’s nearly killing me. My prefrontal cortex is screaming: why can’t you guys do things ahead of time, meet deadlines, plan for the unexpected? Their prefrontal cortexes, which are not completely wired, are asking where the cake is and who’s on Facebook right now.

The kids want to put the site up online at midnight, which currently is 1 hour and 15 minutes away. So this evening we have been working on it from our respective houses, trying to edit stories and fix little flaws from the back end of the site (the non-public end), and now the entire thing has crashed. Turns out the hosting company is doing some server changes RIGHT NOW. Luckily, I got a prompt response to the email and the owner says it will be back up soon, but still… what are the odds of this happening right now? We are one hour from our stated launch time (stated on our Facebook page, at least), we are 12 hours from the entire school watching it after morning announcements and we have… nothing.

Just one more thing about technology that I need to get over: the inability to actually control anything! You can plan and plan and build and build, but you can’t seem to count on the technology to work all the time.

I’m trying to roll with it…

…with joomla’s strange behavior that I can’t seem to get a handle on (why does inserting a “read more” tab into a story wreck the frames of the entire section page? why can’t photos be resized in the image editor?)

…with the hack job that was done to the hosting company last Friday, rendering the site useless for a day. Is that something that will happen again? Should I move our site?

…with the way my Google Docs system of editing turned into a disaster (hint: have the kids upload stories to one place and let the editors come there; sharing stories in Google via emails just confuses everyone because nobody really knows “where” the stories are at any one time)

…with the way Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer all display the website differently and how that makes no sense to me and I can’t control it or make the site look good on all three at the same time

… and now with the site I’ve been working on for seven solid months being just hours away from its reveal and the server (from Canada!) going down for the first time in my experience. Should I move the site? Of course, today I just upgraded our account to get more bandwidth and storage space. Naturally.

I never thought I’d say this, but I think printing a paper — even by hand — might just be easier and more sane.

Working at a technology-friendly high school for the past year has allowed me to embrace the wonders of many free web-based tools and use them in my work.

Starting with the basic Gmail service has led to an exploration of the Google suite of tools, of which I currently use Google Reader (to keep track of dozens of blogs and websites), Google Docs (to store, edit and share documents, build surveys and post pdfs to the web), Google Sites (to run a wiki site for my Journalism class). In the near future, I plan to test out Google Moderator in a class assignment.

My comfort with Google led to experimenting with Ning, the free social network site that allows you to create and maintain a closed-gated community. I have created four nings and trained lots of teachers on how to make and use them. EtherPad is next on my list to try.

The nings led me to blogging, including this blog on Edublog.com. And all of my experience with these programs finally led me, with a push from a colleague, to joomla! when it came time to start my online news site for school. And that is where my high feelings of technology competence came crashing to the floor.

Joomla! is an open-source content management system (CMS) that is very sophisticated and built by computer programmers around the world sort of as a service to the world. Most do it for free; some try to sell extensions and templates for profit. Most likely these programmers think that mere mortals such as high school teachers comfortable with Google and Facebook can use such exotic offerings like their joomla! with few problems. Sort of like, in theory, they should be able to come into my 6th period classroom of 36 10th grade world lit students and lead an orderly discussion on the themes in Oedipus Rex. Right.

I’ve met my match in Joomla! I’ve been using it since last April and I told my colleagues at the ASNE institute this summer that the first 20 hours Joomla! kicked my butt, the next 60 hours we were in a tense standoff and the last 20 hours I kicked it’s butt. That was all true, and it still would be true if I were the only user of the site I’ve set up. Now that there are 28 other users, I’m running into issues. For example, today somehow some of the text on the site has mysteriously turned to italics. I have no idea how or why. Not all the text, just some. There’s no logic to it, and I can’t seem to undo it because I don’t know how it got that way.

Other problems: I took the site offline last week so we could prepare it for the opening day, which is now four days away. The kids all had user ids and passwords and I assumed this would let them log in and submit their stories, but apparently not. After several frantic emails (on a Sunday! and trust me I was at my computer all day), I figured out I had to upgrade their status from editor (on the front end) to manager (on the back end) so they could submit their work. Shortly after doing this, the italics appeared. Sigh.

Creative Commons image courtesy of clairity

I don’t want to say reality bites, which is the title of a really disappointing 1980s movie, and, actually, things are going pretty well in journalism class so far, almost one month into the school year and 10 days until we launch the online news site. I have 28 students, none of whom know what they are doing, which aligns pretty well with my own experience as a journalism adviser.

On the mythical eagerness scale of 1-10, they line up between the 4 and 8. I haven’t found the kid who lives and breathes journalism, who wants to come in at lunch and after school to work on a story or video. But I don’t have a bunch of slugs who just wanted an easy class either. They are mostly content to see me three times a week (block schedule) and take their directions.

Which is kind of a problem. I envisioned being able to give them a general idea of what journalism is, brainstorm some topics and off they would go like a pack of hunting dogs on the scent of a some prey. But they simply don’t know what to do. Their story ideas seem fine when they pitch them to the Editorial Review Board (the five section editors) but somehow become impossible when they start trying to track them down.

For example, one of my most promising students, a sophomore whose father is a journalist, wanted to do a story on how the economy was affecting the school. So she set out to our downtown area last Saturday and tried to interview merchants about how they were faring in the recession. Naturally, none of them wanted to talk about that, especially not to a high school reporter. She came back discouraged and lost. Naturally. We talked (whatever happened to the local angle relating to students? Not sure. She somehow lost the scent of that story and tried for something a lot bigger. I’ve got to admire the ambition, I guess.) We decided the story was too big and too difficult for her first story and found another story for her, on swine flu preparations.

I asked some students to come up with poll ideas today, possible questions they would want students to respond to. I guess I was thinking they might come back with a question on healthcare or even the cafeteria food. They came back with “Which Disney song is your favorite?” Um, okay.

Some students heard about the possibility that the school district is installing cameras in the halls to monitor vandalism, etc… Real news! Actual news! Their idea was to write an opinion piece on cameras and wait to see if they actually came, then do a news story. I had to explain that the idea of a news site is to actually break the news, to be the person who tells others something new, and later to write opinions about the news. The reporter who accepted the story looked like he might get sick over the fact that the principal might not want to talk about the cameras.

Today I had them write down their names, story slugs and what percent they had finished. They each should have two stories before next week’s launch. Each story should have at least three sources, two links and a photo or video. That’s 58 stories. I think two are ready. I’ll be lucky to get half by the launch date. And I think I care about that possibility a lot more than they do. Not sure how to change that. I don’t want to be too hard on them, or too intense, yet I don’t want to be embarrassed at our paucity of news on October 1st either. Most of the period my Editor in Chief–who should be sort of freaking out like me! –ran around with a cake he’d made, cajoling people into eating a slice. Did anything get done in 90 minutes today? I have no proof.

Creative Commons image “Bite Down” from Flickr by soartsyithurts