Student Bloggers/Reporters

Dogwood 2
Originally uploaded by mahlness.

This pretty picture has nothing to do with this post, except for the fact that as a result of the big snow last night, we had no school today... and I finally had some time to work on the web 2.0 skin of our school newsletter.

The Junior Seahawk Newsletter is a student newspaper that I have worked on for over a dozen years. Kids send in reports and jokes/riddles. I add some graphics and distribute a copy to each kid at school, 10 months a year. Then I produce a pdf version and post it online.

For the last four months of school last year I started having the reporters read their reports, and produced a companion podcast. This has grown slowly, because it's just me working on this, but some sigificant strides have been made this year. I'm asking the kids to do the writing on their own - from their classrooms, our lab, even from home. They can always stop by my classroom anytime, as we will always have computers available for them. I've been using Alan November's Web site to host the blog. The reporters simply send in their reports as comments. They've taken to this really easily.

Today I was able to to two things, both of which made me feel great. I figured out how to link to their iTunes home - which I had set up months ago. Anyone can now subscribe to their monthly podcasts, via a link from their blog. And I redesigned the home page, incorporating the Newsletter logo into the blog - not so easy, given the limited accesibility to the November Learning "themes". Anyway, I found a couple of fields that would accept html....

Now I have to sit down with Publisher and their raw reports and produce Volume 16, Issue 5 of the Jr. Seahawk Newsletter.... and listen to the news to see if school is on for tomorrow - or if we have our fifth no-school day of the year.