Hi, A teacher in the Montreal area is currently setting up the basis of a workflow to publish a school newspaper that will involve lots of young journalists. He was inspired by the work of another teacher who uses Scribus for the same purpose. He attended the Scribus workshop at AQUOPS this year and I hope I can convince him to make the jump from participant to animator next year!
So, what's the idea? Very simple. Use a wiki for the collaborative work of the kids. They can write and edit their texts using the strict minimum tools : a computer (any kind, any platform) and an internet browser (any). They can proofread and make corrections. They can be monitored by the teacher who will know at any time where the kids are at. Since it's on the internet, everyone has 24h access from anywhere. With permission control, the teacher can restrain access only to a group of students. After all, this is all about publishing a school newspaper, so you want to keep your scoops! Once the text receives its "ok to print" label, whoever is in charge of the layout exports the text from the wiki to a .txt format and imports it into Scribus. He explained that this requires a bit of code to make this export function work from the wiki. This code can be found here. http://recitmst.qc.ca/wikinimst/wakka.php?wiki=ExporterPageWikiTxT The link below leads to the blog (in French) by Pascal Lapalme, the teacher. (I have given you the essential in this post.) http://www.pascal-tic.org/weblog/index.php/2006/05/18/52-wikinimst-scribus-et-journal-scolaire As he was explaining this to me yesterday, I thought the same approach could be done with pictures to be published. For text and images, no more emails with attachments. But also, and this is not the least, exit the need to uniformise the text from various word processors and various formatting before laying out the newspaper. The kids can concentrate on the content of the text. No "fla-fla" as Pascal puts it! Just plain text. Tracking and accessing stories and pics is easy. Once you have the content, Scribus is there to make it stand out. Curious to see what others think about this! Louis
