What's Up? An ESL Online Magazine
Internet Classics Fair - TESOL 2006
presenter: Chris Jones, Arizona Western College, Yuma, AZ, cjones@azwestern.edu
What's Up, http://www.azwestern.edu/modern_lang/esl/cjones/mag/, is an online magazine showing the writing of ESL students at Arizona Western College, where I teach.
Another excellent example is Topics, http://www.topics-mag.com/, published by Sandy Peters. (I learned how to make What's Up from Sandy Peters and Anne Davis during the 2003 Electronic Village online sessions.) Note that Topics includes more subject areas than I do as well as reader responses.
Steps to setting up your own magazine:
  1. Be able to make documents in html or know someone who will do it for you.
  2. Find a web site where you can upload your magazine such as your institutional server or a free web site at locations such as Yahoo's geocities pages at http://geocities.yahoo.com/ps/learn2/HowItWorks4_Free.html
  3. Start small. The first semester I only used writing produced by my own writing students. (Later, you can expand, but be especially firm about submission deadlines if you're allowing other students or their teachers to provide articles.)
  4. Announce to students that they may submit one piece they have written during the semester for the magazine. Show them examples of what an online magazine looks like.
  5. Ask students to bring in a photo to be scanned or a digital photo. If they have neither, I announce a date when I'll bring my digital camera to class to take photos.
  6. Have students fill in a table listing their name, name of article, and what the photo will show.
    Name Title of Article Photo or artwork
    Maria Jazphx The photo
    Carlos Rozzpr The art
  7. Have students sign a release form that it is O.K. to publish their photo and writing on the Internet. See an example at: http://www.oocities.org/edtec2002/tesol-2004/permit-to-publish.htm
  8. Set a deadline to turn in the article on disk or as an attachment to an email message. (It takes time to reformat all their articles to a web page, so you don't want to have to type the pages yourself.) It's probably easiest to set the deadline for the photos on the same day.
  9. When it's my own students, I usually set a deadline earlier than the final deadline, suggest corrections, and have the students make their own changes - due before the final deadline.
  10. Try to divide the articles into some general subtopics. Then set up your web pages according to the diagram below.
Pitfalls:
  • Deadlines are hard to enforce, especially when some students have absences.
  • If you invite other instructors to include writing from their students, be precise about what you will accept and what the deadline is.
  • Set the deadline several weeks before the end of the term if you want students to be able to see their work online before they leave on a break or vacation.
Weakness:
  • If you don't allow class time for students to read the articles online, they may not take time to do this. Very few of my students have computers at home. Therefore, I usually print one copy of each article in color and give it to the author to share with other students during class time.
Image to show how the site is organized