Print versus on-line : classroom management issues

When moving to a new technology base there are obviously a lot of issues regarding coming up to speed with the technology itself – both for students and the teacher – as well as how that technology might work in practice. And then there is the impact that the technology has on the organization and management within the classroom.

When I was teaching journalism in the late 90’s students had to come to grips with desktop publishing programs, printing, scanning, digital photography. So the technology has now moved to frontpage, blogs, polls, podcasts, photostory, more complex digital photography, photoshop, flash, digital recording and editing (Audacity). Why might this cause a change in classroom management?


In my 90’s journalism classes, students would be working in autonomous teams (consisting of 1 to 10 students) – each with a different magazine of their choice (teenage, social issues, sport, what’s on, satire, new age etc). Their first task in these groups was to present a business plan for their magazine to myself, the principal and the education officer from the local newspaper. It forced them to vision it before they began – fully owning it, though a new vision may emerge during the year. They would then put out 2 to 4 issues per year per magazine, set their deadlines, get advertising, manage finances, and negotiate with printers. The learning was incredible – they had to get out of the classroom and run a real enterprise. They found that some people in the group were more slack than others and that deadlines might not be met and they had to resolve many interpersonal and team management problems.

My role was more of a facilitator and trainer of just-in-time skills and just-to-late debriefing. I probably spent half my time developing journalistic and enterprising skills and the other half leadership and interpersonal skills. At the end of the year students would feel that they had learnt far beyond the scope of the course, a sense of exploring who they were, a new respect for difference and others and a sense of their own abilities.

Few were in my classes because they wanted a career as journalists – they saw it as an experience.

OK, that sounds wonderful. How can I do that now with this new on-line magazine format? I took over the course after it had been running for 8 weeks. During that time there was a real emphasis in skilling up the students on the basic technology in order to put stories on blogs… to get them writing and interviewing. The current teacher then created a frontpage site to link those stories (based on the class design) – he had admin rights to attach it to the student intra-net portal.


It is interesting that the higher level of technology had the impact of immediately reducing student ownership of the process. The students had done some visioning of the online magazine – but no business plan. The teacher collected the stories and put them up on the website. Now, this meant that students could see their work in the public eye within a few weeks of starting the class and start getting feedback … but at the same time their sense of accountability to a student owned entity was not really there.

My first task was handing over the ownership of creating the frontpage website to two students who had the technical skills to update the page (without causing major problems to the College website, or losing the on-line magazine in the process). And I made one of them editor - so now it was his responsibility to collect the stories and make sure that they happened in time. I set up team roles including ethics chairman, marketing and sub-editors and we developed processes for quality control and ethics/ratings checking – every story has to go through a sub-editor before publication to a blog.

But even though people had certain responsibilities (some performing them exceptionally well, while others have done nothing) I was still concerned that there was a lack of ownership and accountability just because the enterprise was one large group. Yes, there was one lesson where we should have got all three new stories up on the web but only 2 were ready. There were three additional stories that should have been finished but none of the students involved had a sense of the importance of their story to the final product. A breakdown in communication between the editor and his staff? No sense of accountability? No sense of the whole?

And I wasn’t helping by acting the teacher – encouraging students to be on task, helping with ideas and writing strategies, pointing them to other students to show them something if they were stuck with the technology. I needed to devolve responsibility… to work with students to recognise the issues involved with the classroom management of such an enterprise and help them to come up with strategies to solve them. In one lesson I even wore a gag … when some students asked me something and I answered (in a muffled way), another came up and tied the gag much more tightly calling out “can anyone help with this problem.”

So now I am finding my way into assisting my students into finding greater power. We talk about it a bit. Perhaps we are ready to work on smaller group projects now? Perhaps a single magazine also gives opportunities for learning? The trick is keeping in mind the issues and looking at what learning opportunities for the whole class emerge from every problem that arises and not trying to solve them myself.