Students gain yearbook expertise at 'Year Boot Camp'

"South Whidbey High School students Kim Eggland, holding her award certificate, and Brianna Taylor finish a yearbook conference July 11-14 at the University of Puget Sound.While many teens were sleeping in and enjoying a lazy summer, two South Whidbey High School students recently attended the Herff Jones summer workshop at University of Puget Sound for an intensive study of the production of first-class yearbooks.Kim Eggland and Brianna Taylor spent four days at the Tacoma campus studying with top yearbook experts from all over the United States, including Kathy Daly of Colorado, recent recipient of the Columbia Scholastic Press Yearbook Adviser of the Year award.It was a great experience, said Kim Eggland, who will be the editor of South Whidbey High School's yearbook this year. Eggland won an award at camp for Excellence in Editorial Leadership.More than 200 yearbook students from as far away as Nevada learned to write features, captions and headlines and studied page design, desktop publishing and photography. Called The Year Boot Camp, the workshop employed a military theme to teach students how to organize a yearbook around a theme.Modern yearbooks try to tell the story of the school year in words and pictures, said workshop co-sponsor Joe Fulcher, a Herff Jones yearbook specialist. We try to teach students to tell the story thoroughly and positively, yet in the breezy idiom of teenagers, he said. A yearbook should be a lasting keepsake, but it should also be fun for the kids in the school.Eggland and Taylor said the teachers worked hard to make the instruction fun.We learned many techniques we can use in our book, such as short profiles, so we can get more students in the book more often, Eggland said.By the time the students left camp, they had developed their theme, cover, page designs and a comprehensive table of contents for their 2002 yearbook. "

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