Publishing



Ten Tips for Online PublishingSchools, teachers and students are all potential publishers. Parents, the local community and outside world may be the audience for the ideas and information you wish to communicate. Once you get comfortable with sharing text-based documents online, you can learn to create and publish multimedia as well. Here are a few simple steps you can take to get started.
 * 1) **Start now** - Unless you have a support staff it may be too time consuming to transform all of your old paper documents from atoms into bits. Commit to creating future documents in web-friendly formats.
 * 2) **Archive later** - Once you get the hang of web publishing you may choose some of your classic documents and publish them online.
 * 3) **Use a computer** - All documents shared with students, parents, administrators and the wider community should be created in a word processor, page layout program or web authoring tool. Print the documents for conventional "delivery."
 * 4) **Export the documents in a web-friendly format** - Most document creation applications allow you to export the document in HTML format (the language of the web). Be aware that fancy formatting and graphics integration may suffer during this process of "dumbing down" your document.
 * 5) **Exchange your documents** - Use Adobe Acrobat Exchange (available at significant academic discounts) to turn your documents into PDF (portable document format) files. PDF files maintain the formatting of the original document and may printed from a web browser or downloaded via the web.
 * 6) **Talk to your network administrator** - As painful as this sounds you may benefit from establishing a relationship with your institution's network guru. Find out if you have available web space for publishing the documents created by you and your students.
 * 7) **Ignore your network administrator** - The distributed nature of the web affords all sorts of opportunities for free web real-estate. If cooperation or communication between you and the tech support folks is impossible then find free web space to suit your needs .5 mb here. 20 mb there - all linked together can create quite a large distributed web site. Your home Internet Service Provider (ISP) may already provide you with unused web space.
 * 8) **FTP** - Here's the trickiest bit for most people - getting your files uploaded to a web server. Try saving all of your files in one folder and uploading the folder at once via an FTP program or the FTP features in popular web publishing tools. Make sure you type all of the account/server information correctly. Try checking your links and documents on a different computer just to make sure everything worked properly. Ask a buddy to run through your site too. An extra set of eyes never hurts.
 * 9) **Spellcheck** - The web is public. Your published work should meet professional standards of grammar, spelling and punctuation. Use the web to build support for your school. Avoid giving critics of public education further ammunition.
 * 10) **Information wants to be free** - Intranets are great for financial institutions needing to keep billion dollar wire-transfers secure. Little security is needed to protect the secrecy of fifth grade writing assignments. In most cases, consider making the work of teachers and students public - even mundane things like cafeteria menus and homework assignments. Parents might want to read them from home and other children around the world might enjoy learning about what goes on in your classroom.