Last week I began interning at Education Week Teacher, a national newspaper that covers K-12 education issues, policy and curricular matters. Education Week publishes print and online versions. The paper also has many active blogs.
The Teacher section focuses more on curriculum, lesson plans, technology in the classroom and matters relating to educators. It is a great resource for teachers.
I am working mostly with web production, copy editing, newsletters, social media and writing blog posts. I pitch ideas for Teaching Now, a blog about current news and information in the teaching world. I also copy edit article submissions and post them in Education Week’s CMS, Bricolage, or Bric.
Bric is a system I haven’t used before. It has different sections where you can post individual paragraphs, subheadings and sections. Each section is coded and designed in a back-end system. So if I need to add an advertisement to a newsletter, it is already pre-coded and designed in the system. This is very time-saving. But it also takes some of the fun out of coding.
One of my web production duties is updating the Teacher home page. I switch out the new Teaching Channel video, update the most popular stories using Omniture analytics and change other sections of the home page. The most exciting part of this is being able to go into the back-end of the newspaper’s website and change what is displayed.
It’s great to gain experience with this CMS — especially since it seems every media organization relies on a different one.