As you have probably noticed, over the holidays we launched a redesign of our web site, edweek.org. Last Summer, we applied a similar update to the Teacher Magazine site, teachermagazine.org, and now we have carried many of the same design concepts over to the site of our flagship publication Education Week — including additional features and enhancements which will migrate back to the Teacher site once we're finished. There are a few additional features and tweaks scheduled to roll out over the coming weeks. After that, we plan to finish the job, updating our "about" and Research Center pages later this Winter, and finally updating the look of Agent K-12 as part of a general upgrade of its software and user interface.

Features in the redesign include:

• a wider display, allowing users to see more content in the browser window;
• new article tools, to enable sharing with friends or via news tagging or bookmarking sites;
• additional community content from blogs and comments featured on the home page;
• more prominent placement of multimedia content on the home page and throughout the site;
• a cleaner, easier to read design, and more consistent navigation; and
• a list of our most popular articles, updated daily.

We hope you like what you see, and encourage you to let us know what you think, by either posting a comment below, or sending email to webeditors@epe.org.

Sincerely,

Paul Hyland
Executive Producer, edweek.org

In the news reports, it soon became clear that several Amish girls had been killed, and that the killer was not Amish. I was so distressed that several children had died in another school shooting that I wanted to go home and crawl into bed. Instead I called the Education Week office asking for a chance to write about how Amish educators might respond to the tragedy. “I know a lot about the Amish,” I said in the phone message to my editor, “I grew up in a town with 1,000 Amish families living around it. And my parents rent a farm to an Amish family.”

I didn’t remind my editor that I was raised Mennonite. In Europe, a group of Anabaptists that became known as the Amish broke away from the Mennonites in 1693, but the two Christian denominations still have some common beliefs and cooperate on service work. Actually I don’t call myself Mennonite anymore, because I’ve attended other kinds of churches for a number of years, but I still feel rooted in my Mennonite upbringing, which includes a sense that both Mennonites and Amish are often not understood well by people outside their communities.

What I didn’t want to do was go up to Lancaster County and become part of the media pack trying to get access to Amish. But I saw an opening to explain to our readers more about who the Amish are.

My article was based mostly on interviews with Mennonites, who get degrees in higher education and don’t reject “worldly” ways nearly to the same extent that the Amish do. Mennonites often become spokespeople for Amish in times of crisis. I’ve noticed this in the coverage of the shootings at the Amish school this last week. A Mennonite midwife talks to the Washington Post about some of the experiences of the girls in the West Nickel Mines School on that awful day. An Amish-turned-Mennonite who works for Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va., talks to the press about what Amish funerals are like.

Donald B. Kraybill, a sociology professor at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pa., who grew up Mennonite and now attends a Brethren church, has spent his career interpreting the faith and culture of Amish and other Anabaptist groups to the outside world. Mr. Kraybill was one of the most sought after experts to talk about the Amish last week, and he comes across as respectful of Amish ways. John Hostetler, who was raised Amish and became Mennonite as a young man, also contributed much to the world’s understanding of the Amish with his scholarship published from the 1960s to the late 1980s.

I don’t know how the Amish feel about the work of these scholars, but in my view they’ve offered a much richer picture of the Amish than the movie “Witness,” which got more play than the scholars' books.

In the end, I wrote an article for Education Week citing Mr. Kraybill’s understanding of why the Amish school is the most protected area of Amish life in terms of technology. The Amish may use cellular phones in some of their businesses, but they aren’t likely to try to increase security by placing them in the schoolroom, he said. That article, “In the Wake of Shootings, Amish Schools Not Likely to Boost Security, Experts Say,” and an article by my colleague, Lesli Maxwell, “Bush Calls Summit on School Shootings,” which tells about political leaders’ pledges to tighten security, were published on www.edweek.org on Oct. 5, and will be coming out in print in the Oct. 11 issue of Education Week.

The accelerated pace of delivering news affects everyone in a newsroom. Photographers, though, are in a great position to adapt to technological changes. We are gear people. We are techie-obsessed by necessity. The photo world even created a digi-specific photo term: "chimping"—which means previewing images on the camera back LCD screen after taking a photo. It's controversial behavior in the photo world. Pro photo rule says: more chimping means less experience and more insecurity. Plus, if you are busy looking down, you’ll miss the Pulitzer Prize-winning moment. Others say the technology is there, why not check exposure and edit in real time? Check out SportsShooter on "Chimping: How and Why?"

How Does the Digital World Affect Photo Editing at Education Week?

The photo department is small. For every 10 reporters there is one photo staff member. With such an inverted ratio, we can’t possibly use staff photographers for every story. We rely on hiring freelance photographers and using photo agency images.

The print version of Education Week is a weekly with rolling deadlines starting a week before the cover date (on Wednesdays) with the entire paper going to press by noon Fridays. Digital image workflow has cut image processing time by one full working day. Eight hours! I started working at Education Week two years ago. Even by then, all assignments were digital.

What About Photos and edweek.org?

In film days, without a larger photo staff or gigantic budget, providing daily photo content for online use would have been near impossible. The worldwide digital workflow means we can move from weekly to daily photo-gathering mode almost seamlessly.

With more space available online, we have the flexibility of using additional photos with stories that don’t fit into a print layout. And the addition of multimedia projects gives us more ways to tell a story. To that end, the photo department recently bought some sound gear for collecting audio on assignments. One microphone mounts to the top of the camera and points out—creating a decidedly "photographer as unicorn" profile.

From a photo perspective, online is a good place for us to stretch our creativity—both visually and on the technology front.

Sarah Evans
Director of Photography

As we've mentioned before, we're working to add even more multimedia storytelling to the site-via podcasts, photogalleries, and audio segments. Besides reading and watching education news, talking about educational issues with other readers may be even more productive. Our online chats give you a chance to send questions to featured guests, including policy wonks, researchers, educators and members of the media, and read their answers live or in our chat transcripts. We hope that our "In Other News" blog will give you an enticing taste of some of the slightly offbeat stories and goings-on we may not include in our regular coverage. TalkBacks provide the opportunity to discuss issues with other readers. Comments on every article would expand on this, giving you the chance to respond to any article you wanted. Would this be helpful? Or just distracting? We're curious.

Some people say technology is creating a more isolated world where every interaction is separated by two monitors, a keyboard, a mouse, a video screen. This type of removed conversation may be instantaneous, critics say, but it's less meaningful, less personal. Plus, who can resist the smell of fresh newsprint, the definitive turning of a page, the rustle of a creased paper, the safe place to rest your coffee mug on your desk or kitchen table? We know it's hard to compete with old faithful, The Printed Word. But, the way we see it, we're not competing, we're enhancing. Edweek.org is your touchstone, your town square, a place to voice your opinions and meet with the rest of the education community. So enjoy your weekly fill of education news with paper in hand. But, when you're done, stop by for some conversation. Raise your hand, pass a note, talkback.

And thanks for dropping by.

Rebekah Lewis
Online Producer
Edweek.org

I recently attended the inaugural PodCamp in Boston to glean as much information as possible about podcasting; how to produce them, how to choose good content, and how to get them out to your public. We are working to produce a podcast for edweek.org subscribers that would provide you with content from all areas of our site, as well as milking the knowledge and expertise of the more than 30 staff writers, editors, and producers working here at EPE towers.

Of course, before we crank out the podcast, we need a solid idea for good content. That's where you come in. Yes you, our readers. What would you most like to hear from an edweek.org podcast? We have some ideas of our own, but you are the ones who would be listening to the show, so if you have ideas, please forward them to me at cstone@epe.org. If you want to sample other news podcasts as a taster, here are some picks:

• CNN
• MSNBC; and
• Jim Lehrer's NewHour podcast.

For the past five years I have produced most of the audio on the edweek.org site, and I believe podcasting is our next step to further enhance our product. No longer will you have to be at your computer to read, listen, or view a news story or feature from edweek.org. Our idea is for you to be able to take edweek.org with you in the car, or on the bus, train, or even along on the short walk, or hard run home from the office.

As my colleague Cheri notes below, we at edweek.org strive to deliver content to our users in ways that are innovative but, more importantly, useful. This past year we have added an RSS feed to the site, produced video content to accompany stories, added various blogs, and continued to provide creative audio and photo galleries to enhance Education Week stories and edweek.org original content.

Quite soon, the edweek.org podcast will add to this mix.
Cheers

Craig Stone
Senior Online Producer
Edweek.org

What Is It?
Multimedia combines traditional storytelling formats (i.e. text, audio, video, photo etc) to more effectively tell a story and thus enhancing users understanding and experience. However, a multimedia piece might not necessarily include all the traditional formats (sometimes even just one format). What separates this format from other traditional formats is non-linear storytelling. Multimedia is (or should be) interactive and it allows users to control how they go through a story. Interactivity—doesn’t it sound like something made for the Web? And it has been propelled largely by the development of the Internet.

Multimedia at edweek.org
At edweek.org, we’ve been producing multimedia content for a while now. For instance, we regularly produce audio/photo slideshow galleries, and interactive graphics.

We would like to do more. We'd like to offer content that fully utilizes the potential that multimedia storytelling and the Web provide. This was the motivation for me to attend the University of North Carolina Multimedia Bootcamp last month.

A First Attempt
The Bootcamp was a 6-day workshop hosted by UNC at Chapel Hill that focused on multimedia storytelling. It was intense, with 12-hour days (hence the name “bootcamp”). Presenters were experts in their fields (i.e., video, audio, info graphics, etc). Participants were made up largely of photojournalists (what I used to be) and also videographers, newspaper editors, and online producers/designers (what I am now).

The fun part was actually producing stories in various media. In order to do “multi”-media, one would first need to know how to produce each medium (and produce it well), right?

Below is a video clip produced by me and three other participants at the Bootcamp (click play button please).

Each of us took turns shooting video footage and later edited the 20-minute footage to a 1-minute clip. This is no Pulitzer (clearly) but a humble first attempt. We hope to bring more multimedia content to you in the future, be it audio, video, interactive graphics, or all of these.

Cheri Hung
Online Producer and Designer

The new site—like the re-launched magazine—is intended to give leaders in the teaching profession the information and tools they need to guide their schools and steer reform. It also has a greatly enhanced layout and organization and more interactivity.

This redesign was done on a very tight schedule, but we are proud of the result—and of the resourcefulness and expertise our of entire team. It’s a sign of things to come across edweek.org.

So please go over to www.teachermagazine.org and give us your feedback. We haven't gotten much so far, so we're sort of wondering whether people have even noticed.

And remember, everything on the Teacher site is free with registration. Come often, tell your friends, etc.

Well, comments are now working, so post away! Also, many posts include trackback as well -- try those out too, so we can see if they are worth our using.

Thanks,
Paul

As many of you may know, nearly a year ago edweek.org—home of Education Week, Teacher Magazine, the EPE Research Center, and Agent K-12—made the decision to begin charging a subscription fee for premium content.

Why did we do it? Well, the hard truth is that while we are a non-profit, we support ourselves with subscription revenue. And the edweek.org site was just a little too good—rich with news, information, research and analysis—and we found our paying print subscribers were leaving because they could get what they needed for free. We offer free registration and paid, premium access, so that we can maintain our paid subscription revenue, while also fulfilling our mission to provide up-to-the-minute, accurate reporting on the latest developments in K-12 education.

Edweek.org visitors have several ways to access the site, depending on their needs. First, they can
register. This is FREE, and provides limited access to edweek.org. Visitors who register can view the headlines on the edweek.org homepage and read any two complete articles of their choice each week. They can also read unlimited articles on teachermagazine.org, participate in chats, review and download statistics from the Research Center, check out all of the jobs on Agent K-12, and receive any of our informative newsletters.

The registration tier gives users a great amount of access, but it is limited. So for the more “casual user,” this is a great option. Believe me, we have nearly ¾ of a million of these folks who are getting exactly what they want out of edweek.org at absolutely no cost.

For educators who need more information more frequently, there is paid, Premium Access. Whether these subscribers choose Online Only (monthly or annually) or Print Plus Online, they get unlimited access to edweek.org, plus a Daily News feature, to keep these subscribers truly up-to-date. They also get access to 25 years of Education Week archives. This feature is especially helpful for researchers and policymakers.

Subscribers to Print Plus Online obviously get both premium access to edweek.org along with Education Week in print (and at only $10 more to include print, it’s a great deal :-). All of these paid subscribers are the “power users” of news and information on K-12 education.

So almost a year after changing from a free site to a tiered subscription site, we have learned that we can continue to provide the quality K-12 education reporting we are known for, keeping tens of thousands of educators, administrators, and others informed on the issues on a daily basis at absolutely no cost. At the same time, we can provide a deep well of information and unlimited access to power users who are willing to subscribe to edweek.org.

Stefanie Hemmingson
Director of Audience Development

Anyway, we didn't just decide just to redesign Teacher out of the blue. The new site is to accompany a major re-launch of the print magazine that’s been nearly a year in the planning. In an effort to meet changing market demands—and maybe create some new ones—Teacher Magazine will have a new editorial orientation: Each issue will focus on an important theme in education, starting this month with the Achievement Issue, and will be designed to give teachers the practical tools and information they need to spur reform. The magazine will also be more explicitly targeted to leaders in the teaching profession.

Our job was to translate this vision to the Web site. Being the Web team, we got a pretty late start on this, and then decided to do way more than was humanly possible anyway. We somehow resolved not only to integrate the magazine’s new format onto the site but also to give the site a thorough overhaul—i.e., to try out a bunch of new stuff we’d been talking about on a theoretical level for months. Among other things, we expanded the page width, diversified the layout, reworked navigational organization, and created lots of new space for multimedia and interactive features.

We’ve also tried to give Teacher a more distinct identity on edweek.org—as we’ve learned from a number of readers that it doesn’t really have one currently. (A lot of people apparently don’t even realize that the entire Teacher site is free with registration.)

All this hasn’t made for the most restful of summers. An older colleague of mine in a former job once told me that redesigning a publication is lot like making sausage—i.e., it ain’t pretty and you probably don’t want to be around for it. That quote has popped into my head at least a few times in recent months, particularly when our proposed new site design was in the dreaded “comment” stage. (Democracy can be a real nuisance sometimes.) But I think I can now safely say that things are coming together—thanks in large part to our remarkably talented and composed designer Chienyi “Cheri” Hung and our masterful technical consultant Serge Ivanchenko. We are very excited about what we have going.

So make sure to check out www.teachermagazine.org on Aug 14, if only to see if we make the deadline. We hope you like what you see. If enough people do, you may soon see something like it on the rest of edweek.org, too.

This year, under Chris' leadership, we ventured into the deep waters of graduation rates with the analysis, Diplomas Count, which generated more than a little interest. As well it should have. It's a groundbreaking report. Part of the report included a mapping feature. This feature, á la google maps, would allow readers to drill down to district-level graduation data—the first time EdWeek has published data at that granular a level.

We were under a very tight deadline on this project. When it went live on June 22, the mapping portion (provided by a third party) which we had touted highly in all our promotional materials, was just not ready.

No problem. We posted a note on the table of contents that it would be ready in a week.

It wasn't.

Then we said by the end of July.

Um ... that would be a no-go.

Believe me, we don't like promising our readers things and then not delivering. I think I can go out on a limb (after being here eight years) and say that we don't make promises lightly here at edweek.org. I can also safely say that it's very rare that we don't deliver on time. We're a newspaper for pete's sake, (ok, news outlet, for you online purists), so we get the concept of deadlines.

But sometimes...there are extenuating circumstances. We're ambitious. We have to rely on third parties. As the saying goes...stuff happens. No one's fault. But we could have communicated the delay better to our readers.

You are definitely going to see an advanced mapping feature; we have every intention to make it happen.

But you won't catch me posting any firm dates until I have seen it with my own little eyes.

Meanwhile, we'll consider this another deposit in the bank of lessons learned.

When we launched this blog last year, its original purpose was to discuss our new pricing model, including paid subscriptions along with registration. While that is going well, we would like to fine-tune our related messages — for example, many readers may not be aware that there is still significant content on our site that requires only registration, and is otherwise still available for free (such as all of Teacher Magazine online), and even our Education Week articles are available for free — up to two-per-week for all registered readers.

Our subscription business model is actually old news; our content and services are undergoing many more changes today. We're introducing numerous interactive technologies and other means for our readers to provide content and to interact with us and with each other. Teacher Magazine is currently being redesigned, both in print and online, so stay tuned for more information about that — both new features we've already introduced, and a whole new look coming soon. Expect to see contributions from others on my staff and around the organization, and we most definitely want to hear from you, our readers, so please don't hesitate to post comments in response to anything we write.

Paul Hyland
Executive Producer, edweek.org

From this point on, access to certain content requires a print subscription to Education Week or an online-only subscription. Our registered subscribers, more than a half-million strong, will continue to have access to Teacher and to two free Ed Week articles per week of their choosing. However, access to the archives, the full issue of Ed Week, the Ed Counts database, and The Daily News now requires a subscription.

Those of you who subscribe to the newspaper and have not yet claimed your free online subscription, please do that by clicking here.

Those who want to subscribe only to Education Week online, click here.

Those of you who want to start a print subscription (and receive free access to everything on edweek.org) click here for our combo offer.

If you who do not want to subscribe, yet, but do want access to all of Teacher and to two free Education Week articles a week, along with access to all of our Agent K-12 jobs site and partial access to our Research Center, click here.

Anyone who has questions or comments, please post them now, and we will answer them daily.

Here are Frequently Asked Questions that also could help you.

In fact, an important part of our editorial strategy under the new subscription model is to provide more and better online content for teachers and prospective teachers—more interactive forums, more news features, more Web resources. The idea is to create, alongside the premium Education Week content, a dynamic free site primarily for classroom educators.

This is where I come in. My official title is Assistant Managing Editor for Teacher Online and Agent K-12. But I’m also known, more descriptively, as the Teacher Content Producer. That is, I’m in charge of developing and managing new editorial content on the Teacher Magazine channel on edweek.org, as well on our education jobs site, AgentK-12.org.

To a certain degree, I see my new position as an almost natural part of the evolution of the site—a kind of branching out that will help us develop new interactive features and think more about the needs of unique (and often neglected) segments of our audience.

If you take a look at the Teacher site, you’ll get an early picture of what we’re trying to do. This summer, we’ve added Web-only newsmaker interviews; live chats; a new news department called "Trend Tracker"; a new Teacher TalkBack discussion forum; and enhanced photo presentations. We’re also planning to launch a couple new blogs by classroom teachers, and we’re continuing to produce a spirited weekly news-roundup column called Web Watch.

We’re planning similar enhancements to Agentk-12.org, our job site. In fact, we launched a first-ever blog on that site just last week—by an Indiana education student who’s finding out what it’s like to work in an inner-city school. For Agentk-12.org, we also want to focus on creating interactive tools to help education job seekers and recruiters. One of our biggest priorities is to develop a data tool to help prospective teachers sort through each state’s teacher-preparation and certification requirements.

In developing content on both sites, I plan to work closely with teachers themselves and to use the Web’ interactivity to capture teachers’ voices and opinions. We want all our new content to be practically useful and highly participatory.

I'd appreciate any feedback.

Anthony Rebora

Like many other newspaper and magazine publishers, we have grappled with creating viable business models to maintain and expand these services in the face of changing market realities. While I've been involved in the Internet and online information industry for many years, my role here is on the technical rather than business side, so I will explore the affects of these challenges on our technology and vice versa.

I have a background in usability and consistent user interface design, so I want to ensure that we don’t sacrifice the user experience by devoting too much of our space to promotional and advertising content. Until now a portion of each screen has been dedicated to promotional uses, but given the increasing space used by advertising, we may want to reconsider such rigid divisions, so that our pages are as cohesive as possible, and that editorial content is not overwhelmed by promotional and advertising content.

The development process to implement these changes has required managing relationships with numerous other firms. This includes the company that handles our recently introduced registration system, and the company that manages our print subscription process – as well as interactions between these two firms. In-house software development and testing requirements involve our Web-hosting provider in the planning and implementation process as well.

In an unforeseen move, our Web services vendor recently decided to change co-location facilities, moving all of our servers to a new facility, at the same time as we’re performing all of this development and testing. In order to reduce the risk of outages during or after our subscription rollout, we opted to have our facilities moved at the earliest possible time. It turned out to be a painful but necessary move; it took this firm several weeks to restore all of our servers and services. We finally have everything back online – hopefully in a more reliable state - well before the launch of our new restrictions, and we hope our readers will forget about any glitches or outages by then.

We want to make sure that we continue to improve our reliability and timeliness, to deliver new services and expand existing ones, and to keep up with technological developments that could provide added value to our readers. A list of projects that we are currently working on includes:

· Additional newsletters;
· More blogs and related technology;
· The introduction of RSS feeds;
· Improved search functionality and capabilities;
· More multimedia content;
· Other things we haven't even thought of yet.

I welcome your feedback. Tell me what you like (and don't like) about the way our Web site works, along with your ideas for better ways to use technologies, provide content, and provide interesting ways for you to interact with our service, our contributors, and each other. I look forward to our journey together into this brave new world.

Paul Hyland
Web Technology Lead
Editorial Projects in Education