This video explains how to create a staff application or other form in Google forms and then embed the form in your WordPress website.

As you know (or might not), my experience is in newspapers and other print and online publications. Yearbooks are a bit of a mystery. I never worked on my high school yearbook staff, but being a reader — and naturally nosy — I stared for hours at the photos and read every bit of the yearbook copy, as awful as it often was. So I’m excited about advising a yearbook staff but am apprehensive about the quality of journalism that goes into many books and the realistic potential of incorporating the web and multimedia tools.

While learning about themes and design at a yearbook workshop in Dallas this weekend (and how to up the journalism quotient), I began thinking of how online journalism concepts could be incorporated into the yearbook. (No worries — I would never advocate getting rid of the physical book. Who knows if the Internet will be around in 100 years?)

User-generated content — Many yearbook staffs are already soliciting photos from students through Facebook. I could see the photos — a form of citizen journalism — displayed on a page devoted to submitted photos or throughout the book with a special tag to indicate it was a reader photo. This would be a great marketing tool and help build buzz around the yearbook. Contests could be held during the year for students to submit their best photos. This could be especially useful for small staffs. (Before the photos made it into the print yearbook, staffers would have to get the larger digital file of the photo from the submitter in person rather than take it off Facebook to preserve the quality of the photo.)

UPDATE: Christine Grazio, a rep with one of the yearbook companies, added polls and quotes to the mix of possible user-generated content. Which makes me wonder — why not have a contest or solicit first-person personal essays from students to be printed in the yearbook?

Website — A yearbook website will be more static than a news website, but it’s a necessary tool for marketing the book and gathering information from teachers, administrators and students about upcoming events and coverage ideas through tools like Google forms. Staffers could post updates on the book throughout the year and even ask students to vote on the theme and cover design to get students more involved and feel more connected to the finished product. A calendar showing which events yearbook staff plan to cover and a schedule of group and individual posed photos would not only show those outside of class how hard staffers try to cover a variety of events, but it would also help teachers, coaches and club leaders determine whether their big events are on staff radar.

Social media — Facebook and Twitter are good marketing tools for the newspaper and yearbook. And they can be useful for finding story ideas and sources. Lots of yearbooks on Twitter. It helps if one staff member has the role of social media editor to plan posts on these sites and create a social media strategy.

These are the three areas I plan to focus on this year. Hopefully my students will be able to come up with others. If you have had success bringing online journalism to the yearbook classroom, please share in the comments section or send me an email.

Cramming everything students need to know about new media into a few days of training is tough. There’s so much to choose from. So many programs to learn. So many cool web projects to create.

Here’s a tentative plan for a new media training I’ll be doing in Austin in August for TAJE and ILPC. I’d love feedback on topics I should include or leave out. These are lessons I also plan to cover in the first couple of months of school as my students at Dripping Springs High School get their website up and running.

Intro to online journalism

Important elements: multimedia, interactivity, connectivity and immediacy

These should be used as a guide for any web projects and the site as a whole. I have students come up with ideas for how they will address these areas after analyzing scholastic and professional news sites.

What makes a good website?

This is where I fit in the importance of finding a balance of content-aggregation and content-creation.

How does this fit in with the existing program?

This is where I get kind of philosophical. Incorporating online journalism into a scholastic journalism program (or a professional newsroom for that matter) is more than just adding a website and putting the print stuff online. I don’t like to gloss over the massive change required to give students the most realistic experience. The web must come first. Print must now give readers a different experience: longer stories written in a narrative structure and fewer stories that give weeks-old news in inverted pyramid form. The web and print must be equal, which includes the amount of pull the staff for both publications have over content.

How does a website work?

We don’t all need to be writing code, but we can’t rely on the techie in the corner to do everything. Knowing how websites work is an important tool for everyone to have, and knowledge is of course power. Giving up that kind of power isn’t good for journalism — or a scholastic journalism program in the long run as kids with that knowledge graduate.

What are my website options?

First you have to decide between a static versus dynamic site. Once you go with a dynamic site, you pick a content-management system. There are also a couple of choices for programs that don’t want to set it up, which are great options for the first couple of years to get the hang of posting to the web. You’ll pay in flexibility or cost though.

Set up a site using WordPress as a content-management system

WordPress is the most widely used and the easiest to work with without knowing too much code, so I would go with this one. But no matter which one you choose, going the route of a content-management system (the dynamic site) is the best choice because students should be familiar with the concept and have experience uploading to the web. Which brings us to…

Designing and posting

Web design

Usability, accessibility and good old-fashioned design come into play here.

Writing for the web

It’s different, as are headlines. I also like to cover blogging in this portion.

Photos for the web

Copyright, quick editing and creating photo galleries and stories.

Making the site mobile

Oh-so-important for teens. Anyone out there creating iPhone and iPad apps?

Putting the print edition online

Issuu.com is the big one.

User-generated content

Staffers can’t be everywhere. Make use of students who are — and their photos.

Multimedia

Storyboarding

An important part of multimedia is planning. Make sure you do this and you’ll never see a video package that makes you wonder if all this fancy stuff is taking away from the actual journalism.

Podcasts, audio slideshows and video

These are the big three. People ask what programs students should know. Audacity is a free, easy-to-learn audio editing program. I like Soundslides, which was developed by a journalist for meshing audio with photos in a super-easy format. For video, iMovie is just as good for students who don’t have the time or interest to take a more-intensive video training to learn Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro.

Free web-based multimedia tools

From map mashups to multimedia tools like vuvox.com and dipity.com, there’s no shortage of free tools out there to create cool multimedia projects.

Managing a site

Staff organization

This is a biggie. I’ve yet to see two programs organized exactly the same way for print, broadcast or convergence. Here’s how I plan to set up staff, and here’s how other schools do it.

Legal and ethical issues, advertising and marketing

Social media is a becoming a large part of marketing a site and newsgathering, which increases the need for social media ethics policies.

Putting it all together

Gotta have a plan. Who will post what when? Who manages the Twitter feed? What is breaking news? How will you handle posting breaking news to the site? What topics would work with a live chat? Where are we? Is this real life? Why are we doing all of this?

Oh yeah, because it’s important for students to learn these skills, and for the future of journalism.

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.