Plan, design, and produce a project that captures your school community by using online design, journalistic writing, budgeting, and collaboration skills.
Overview
- Essential Question: How do we create a yearbook that is more than just a collection of images, but truly tells the story of that year?
- Areas of study: English, technology and/or recovery credits
- Type and amount of credit earned: ½ credit
- Community partner: Jostens or any other organization that produces yearbooks
Competencies
- Writing: journalistic writing techniques
- Self-Management: act with honesty, recognize diversity, take responsibility, and manage time.
- Project Management: plan, execute, manage, assess projects, establish priorities to meet deadlines
- Social Responsibility: recognize and listen to diverse ideas and opinions; make sure everyone in the school community is included
- Additional competencies could include:
- Online design: design pages and layouts
- Budgeting: ad sales, collection, deposits, etc.
- Reporting: attend school events and write about them using a journalistic style
- Collaboration/Teamwork: work together to get projects finished on time
See the detailed ELO description for the full text of these competencies.
Student activities
- Set overall goals and objectives for the yearbook. For a group ELO, consider assigning positions – editor, photo editor, ad sales manager, etc. For an individual ELO, outline specific time expectations and what the student will be responsible for creating.
- Research the journalistic approach to documenting (writing/photographing) the events throughout the year. This can include students going through old yearbooks to assess, look for, and identify journalist and/or non-journalistic approaches. In addition, students should research and reflect on the value of using storytelling elements in a yearbook.
- Create a manifesto stating their individual goals and information re., storytelling and journalistic approaches.
- Work to meet all deadlines, cover events, sell ads, etc.
- Meet periodically with community partner to go over layouts, answer questions, and discuss ideas.
- Write a reflection on their experiences.
- Create a portfolio of work.
Assessment
Students can be assessed at various stages of the yearbook making process. At ConVal we assessed students after each deadline and at the end of the year. The final assessment consists of a collection of artifacts, writing, papers, and copies of pages from the book. Students create individual portfolios which include their original manifesto, any pages they worked on with written information about they did for each page, copies of any writing they did for the yearbook, and a reflection that outlines any non-visible work or learning the student did and assess how the experience went for the student.
More information
Students who want to do more work can earn more credit and students who are interested in doing less work can earn less credit. You can have groups of students working together, earning different amounts of credit – based on the work they plan/want to do and/or their position. Perhaps, editors will earn a full credit because they will be expected to do more work outside of class, for example.
There is a lot of flexibility in this ELO. It can run in conjunction with or to augment an already existing yearbook program or it can be used to start a yearbook program. It can be modified or simplified to meet IEP needs at any point. I also highly recommend working with a yearbook producer – like Jostens – because they provide curriculum and materials. Also, I recommend giving students a lot of control and decision making power, they should be the driving force.
This ELO was submitted by Amanda Bastoni, CTE Photo/Video teacher at ConVal Regional High School. Email teacher for more information
