The Reflector has been replaced by the school’s new online publication, Sightline. There is now talk about the Witmarsum going digital starting next year.
Although this change does not involve me directly (the switch won’t take effect until after the 2012-2013 yearbook is published) it saddens me that the future of the Witmarsum staff may be wiped out as well. Being an editor on the yearbook staff has been a highlight of my high school career. It has allowed me to become a leader and given me an opportunity to get to know other staff members that I might not have come into contact with otherwise.
However, I do recognize that just about everything is going digital in today’s world. Many would rather go online and view something than having to dust off a book and read it. In order to keep up with this ever changing world, going digital would be one way of keeping up with the online fad.
Despite the ever growing popularity of the web, there are some voices in the Bethany community that disagree with joining the norm of digital advancements. My co-editor of the Witmarsum staff, Maddie Gerig (12), agrees by adding “it’s sad that the school feels like they need to put everything online in order to reach out to the younger generation.”
The purpose of getting a yearbook is to have a physical copy of something that captures your high school years, see how things changed from freshman to senior year, and show your children later on in life the time period you grew up in. Hanna Hochstetler (‘11) finds that there is “no point in a yearbook online, and sounds like a pain to have to look it up. Having something concrete is so much better and allows you to reminisce with others. Even today, I look at my parents’ yearbooks.”
There are some big expenses that come with having a book copy of a school yearbook. It’s much more environmentally friendly not to print off hundreds of copies of yearbooks, each containing 190 some odd pages. Cutting yearbooks out and posting them online would save paper by the thousands. Also, because there would be no paper, there would be no cost to pay for all the paper.
But then comes the question of the sustainability of the internet. There is always something new that comes out, when something bigger or better is established nobody is going to want the old version. If something comes along that is a substitute for the internet, how many people will still use the old ways? Therefore, if it’s not updated to a potential new version of the internet, then you lose access to your old high school yearbooks. Whereas if you would have a physical copy that you could take with you or store it for safekeeping. The effect and feeling of being able to sit down and flip through a yearbook would be lost.
How many of us would actually go online and look it up? The digital fad hasn’t seemed to hit the Bethany community as much as it has in other schools, so what makes the supporters of an online yearbook think that our student body will take the time to check out the yearbook? If nobody looks at it, it would seem as if the time and effort put in by the yearbook staff would be wasted.
I don’t see any point in making the yearbook online until the staff is 150% positive that the school will start their 1 to 1 program. The 1 to 1 program is the idea that every student and faculty in the school will receive a laptop for the entirety of their studies at Bethany. The school had changed plans before the 1 to 1 plan went into action, which in result cut the Reflector staff and paper that was altered into the Journalism class that makes the Sightline news website. While asking around the student body, I learned that not many knew what Sightline was or that it was up and running. Nor did they know where to go and look. Because there is no 1 to 1 program, kids aren’t as updated on the media that the school offers, due to the fact that they don’t have access to it 24/7 like predicted. I’m afraid the yearbook would fall into that same pattern, it would be unknown to students and faculty until they would have access to the web all the time.
Along with the 1 to 1 program, there is the unreliability of the schools internet. As students we’ve experienced failed internet connections and computer problems on what seems like a day to day basis. If we would get every student to have a computer, then that would just clog up the internet even more, making it even harder for students to then access the online yearbook.
Many students are involved in so many things, and even in a small school such as Bethany, it becomes difficult to try to include everyone involved on one spread (2 pages) in a book. Allowing the yearbook to be online gives you more up-to-date options, such as video, audio, and slideshows, providing more chances to involve more people.
Although the online yearbook would get more people involved, there is the issue of the quality of photographs online. As our Witmarsum staff has quickly learned, photos on Facebook and other online sites don’t have high enough quality to print. We would be compromising quality for quantity.
Overall, there are some slim benefits to having an online yearbook; just not enough to convince me (or most of the student body) that going digital is best for the school at this point. The school is becoming more encompassed in this digital world, a world where our faces would be in computers all day long, a world that would allow students to remove themselves from the social aspects of school. This world shouldn’t take away everything from our schools atmosphere just because it’s “becoming more popular in other high schools and colleges.” Taking away our printed yearbook takes away the personal aspect that comes along with browsing pages of your past years.
~Laken Richer