Last week, high school journalism advisers and students spent four days at the Texas Interscholastic League Press Conference at the University of Texas at Austin talking about two of my favorite topics: yearbook and newspaper.

This year for the first time, the summer workshop offered a convergence option, which I had the pleasure of instructing. Over the four days, we went over options for having a news website and the basics of online journalism, and participants created websites with WordPress as the content-management system and learned how to edit audio in Audacity and create audio slideshows in Soundslides.We also talked about staff management, multimedia storyboarding and writing for the web.

Whew.

By the end, heads were spinning, but I hope the five students and several advisers who braved the course took away a better understanding of how websites work and some ideas for what to put on them.

Here’s one website-in-progress started by co-editor-in-chief Kira Witkin of the Episcopal School of Dallas.

Here’s another by the adviser Laura Negri of the Kerronicle at Alief Kerr High School in Houston, who found a couple of important WordPress plugins for staff work flow:

The editorial calendar plugin sets up a calendar where the web editor(s) can schedule posts for particular days and easily rearrange posts by dragging them onto another day. I’ve already installed it on mine, even though it’s just me. The edit flow plugin is even more essential for high school newsrooms because it adds more possible statuses to unpublished posts. Instead of just “draft” or “published” options as come standard in WordPress, edit flow adds “assigned,” “pending review,” pitch,” and “waiting for feedback,” which allows for multiple edits and reviews before publication.

In August, ILPC is putting on another convergence workshop in Austin with the Texas Association of Journalism Educators, which I’m revising to include legal issues, a better web host option (although many advisers recommended Go Daddy, the company must have been having a bad weekend) and other tweaks based on the first run-through of the training.

Once the training is tweaked, I’ll post more of the lessons on this site. In the meantime, my next month is about preparing for the fall and helping my students start their own website later this month.