by Bernadine Judson, yearbook adviser
Etiwanda High School, California
Juggling the demands of teaching, advising and parenting is daunting. What to do? Wave your magic wand. Voila! StudioWorks, Balfour’s online software solution.
I am a new teacher in an old teacher’s body.
In 1984 I got my first job teaching English, newspaper and yearbook. (That may sound crazy, but that is what I signed up for since my college major was communications.) I was a yearbook adviser for 13 years, and I left my post for awhile to stay home and be with my children. When I left, my yearbook staff was designing the yearbook using Adobe Pagemaker on our brand-new Mac Classics. (If you have no idea what I am talking about, picture a toaster with a low resolution TV screen on the side.) We would send photos with grease crop-marks on them to the publisher to be sized and dropped into our designs.
I returned to my yearbook adviser job 11 years later, horrified to find that everything had changed – significantly. People had stopped using film and printing their photos at 1-hour photo! They were using SD cards and storing photos on flash and external drives. Even scarier, they were cropping, sizing and flowing them into their own designs using a scary program called InDesign. I had to relearn everything I was doing. Well, I got trained in InDesign. It wasn’t too bad. I enjoyed being able to see completed spreads with nobody to blame for their quality except my own sweet staff. But the problem was I spent way too much time at school. This InDesign thing invaded my family by keeping me at school long hours waiting for students to complete their work sometimes until after 11 p.m. My students didn’t have InDesign at home.
In fact, they didn’t even have computers which could support it.
Enter a Fairy Godmother.
At a yearbook camp, I met a young woman who changed my life. One command. “Use the company’s online software.”
She told me it was the best thing she ever did for herself. She was right. I tried Balfour’s’s online design program and knew it was the best thing I could do for my family, my staff and me.
InDesign purists may have a couple of questions.
Can you produce a quality, innovative, award-winning book without InDesign?
Yes. Most of the features that I used in InDesign are part of the online program. What I can’t do, I produce in PhotoShop and import. That, however, is pretty rare. Also, the online program has additional features just for yearbook production which we would be lost without (or the staff would go crazy trying to replicate in InDesign).
Because the program is online, networked through your school’s infrastructure, doesn’t it crash?
No. Not really. Sometimes it is a little slow and my district is working on that. To tell you the truth, I spent a lot more time hunting for lost files and crying over broken school computers when I lost completed pages than any network slow down that has ever occurred. When you do your book with the online software, the company is responsible for all of your storage. You have to push the save button every once in awhile, but you don’t have to remember where you saved it. This is a newbie-technology-user in an old-lady body’s dream. SCORE!
The most important thing is I have a life that isn’t dictated by yearbook deadlines (well mostly). I can take my children to sports practices. I can cook for my family, and I can work on the yearbook at my kitchen table. I have really enjoyed learning technology and networking with my students from home. When we have to work late, we log in at home, open our private Facebook group page (yes, I know that is a little dated now too) and we communicate about what is being worked on and completed. We use our phones to take photos of the screen to share on our Facebook page when we don’t know someone’s name. We stalk their friends for numbers and interviews using social networking sites. Most important, it is all from the comfort of our own homes.
When I came back after being away from yearbook, I would never have imagined that I would be so comfortable working this way; I have embraced all of the new technology I would have to learn. And, I am still learning something new every day. However, if I didn’t, I know I would be bored, and I might as well retire. Wait. What?
Excerpt from Elements magazine “How’d You Do That?: Software Online.”
Etiwanda High School’s yearbook can be purchased here.
