Pennsylvania School Press Association

The Internet has been both a boon and a curse to journalists and news media. In many ways, the Internet provides student journalists a chance to extend and deepen their stories. However, as with all tools, it is important to learn how to use it in a safe, legal, and ethical manner.

Whenever a student newspaper makes the jump to an online publication, a few common questions tend to accompany that jump:

• Can student journalists use images they find online to accompany their articles?
• How can student journalists adapt existing stories that they find online?
• Where do you draw the line when promoting your story online (e.g. social networking)?
• Can other media outlets use a story published on our blog for their own purposes?

To help educators and students find answers to these new questions in the world of Journalism 2.0, the folks over at Creative Commons have developed a tool to actively engage student journalists and their advisers in these issues. If you’re struggling with questions like these in our increasingly connected world, check out Student Journalism 2.0.

It’s that time of year.  I mean, the time when the teenagers on your yearbook staff spend way too much picking out a color scheme to accompany the book’s theme.  Fortunately, there are many web-based tools out there to speed up this process so that they can get to work!

Whether you have a theme already selected or not, check out Cymbolism.  According to the site, it tries to “quantify the association between colors and words, making it simple for designers to choose the best colors for the desired emotional effect.”  Whenever you first load the site, you are given word, and asked to choose the color that you associate with the word.  Imagine thousands of folks doing this a day, and you’ve got a powerful tool.  Click the Words button at the top to check out the results for all of the words on the site, organized alphabetically.  You can even compare results over time.

If you like daily inspiration with color schemes, browse on over to COLOURlovers, and check out their blog.  Sometimes they find videos or photos and build color schemes based on them, and other posts include unique patterns.  In fact, their Palette library contains over 900,000 different user-generated combinations.  Regardless, the color combinations are always thought-provoking.  This site provides a nice resource for keeping current with current trends in colorful design.  Also check out their COPASCO tool to work with custom combinations.

ColoRotate allows you to drag-and-drop colors using a unique 3D tool.

There are many sites out there that allow you to create, mix, match, save, and export color schemes.  One of the newest and, in my opinion, coolest, is ColoRotate.  ColoRotate is similar to lots of other color scheme generators, with one big exception: you can design schemes in 3D using their unique tool that allows for dragging and dropping of colors.  Back in the 2D world, there is a large selection of color combination sites, including:

• Adobe’s Kuler (which you can directly plugin to CS4) – my personal fav
• Color Scheme Designer
• Color Jack (check out the Sphere and Galaxy tools)
• Color Combos
• Kolur – If you’re having trouble visualizing your palettes applied to your actual designs, check out this site where palettes are applied to graphic samples, making it easier to visualize the final product.

In addition to the sites above, there also sites that are specifically built to extract/built color palettes based on images that you upload.  Each of them has its own little bells and whistles.  Here’s a short list:

• Pictaculous (my personal fav)
• Color Hunter
• Colr
• Color Palette Generator

For even more color palette tools, check out Web Design Booth’s The Ultimate List of Online Color Tools for Web Developers (41 and counting).

Are your staffers begging to do yet another collage of photos in your yearbook or newspaper?  In my experience, these all-too-often hastily constructed space-fillers turn out looking bad.  Bad like my caffeine-addled 14-year-old neice’s MySpace layout bad!

Fear not!  You and your staffers can easily create highly customizeable, professional quality photo collages with Shape Collage 2.0, which you can download absolutely FREE at this website.

It’s a relatively small download that works great on Windows, Mac, Linux or your trusty ol’ Java Web Start launcher (the same thing that you might use to run Taylor Publishing’s StudioWorks).  You choose which photos to use, choose an on-screen or print size, set a few options (you can do custom shapes!), and presto, you’ve got yourself a high-quality photo collage file.  One of the best features is the choice to save the finished product as an Adobe PhotoShop (.PSD) file.  This file keeps all of the separate photos on different layers for easy tweaking later.  Awesome!

Why don’t you check out more screenshots of Shape Collage in action, or maybe peruse a few examples of creations from the amazing little app.  …And if you and your staff appreciate what can be done with the software, perhaps you’d like to throw a little donation in the direction of Vincent Cheung, the app’s generous creator.  (P.S. – Neither PSPA nor I are affiliated with Cheung, but his app is that good, that I thought it worth a mention.)

Psssst.  And if you’re a fellow Facebook’r, and you actually want to save the hideously-distorted photos posted on the site’s album, check out Cheung’s other useful app called FaceDown.

Do you have a glog?  If you like to publish online, there are many new ways to do so.  One very fun site, www.glogster.com, gives you the tools to make your own glog (electronic poster) and publish it online.  See the one below for ideas of your own.  What a great way to create the ultimate school project or just state your views.

http://rachelxwaxman.glogster.com/Gandhi-D/

John Markoff of the New York Times, who has covered technology since the 1970s, argues that newspapers continue to give readers something that their would-be digital replacements have promised but not delivered.  In this age of social news sites and an overwhelming number of RSS feeds, Markoff explains why newspapers still matter.

This is a talk from the Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference.  To download this talk, participate in its discussion, or view other details, check out its TED page.

If you have iTunes, you can subscribe to the TEDtalks podcast.