The Yearbook World of Scott Geesey
from Jostens Yearbooks of central/northern Pennsylvania
ARCHIVE - OCTOBER 4, 2020
TIME FOR A REAL GAME CHANGER: Here Comes Jostens Yearbook+
Hello! Autumn is starting off rather cool which might be the one normal thing about this season. I hpe you are doing well but as colder temperatures approach it's anybody's guess if schools will stay in buildings or if everyone will be sent home again.
But no matter what, this year's 2021 yearbook could be the most historic ever. It certainly will be different as events or groups are canceled, much like what happened in the spring.
For folks in my neighborhood I hope you'll join me for my twice weekly live online yearbook sessions continuing through the fall. We have some great topics coming up like using social media, promotion, writing and telling more stories this year.
Imagine - telling stories about EVERY student in school this year. How to do it?
If you're struggling with yearbooking right now, don't feel badly. Everyone is struggling in many ways this crazy year, not so much with yearbook but with everything else at school. Remote learning, hybrid, masks, distancing, no groups - what a year.
One fear is that if everyone is tossed home again at some point, they'll stay there for a long while. Could that mean a fracturing of your school, students getting disconnected, people losing interest in the school year?
How can your yearbooking effort help your entire school this year? Your usual coverage of school teams, clubs, groups and events will help. But is everyone covered?
Here's where innovation steps in, thanks to our amazing tech staff at Jostens. It's called Yearbook+.
Imagine a digital tool that would allow EVERY student in school to tell their OWN story with their OWN pictures. And that's for starters. That's Yearbook+.
We learned a lot of things in the formation of Plus. One is that sometimes a mobile app isn't the right way to go. Our former ReplayIt app was a good app but we found that the great majority of schools and students never used it. We'd update the app...and still no action. The reason: kids told us they just didn't want to put another app on their own device.
So our crew went to work. What is a digital tool that anyone could use anytime, anywhere on any device? And how can we create a tool that ANYONE at school can benefit from? Not just the "popular kids" or the active kids - anyone.
Two years of work went into Yearbook+, a tool where every student will have a chance to tell their OWN story with up to 10 of their own pictures. And we mean EVERY student. Students simply register via our website - we want to confirm that John Smith is indeed John Smith.
Then students can upload images that tell their OWN story and they'll have the school year to do it. All images are moderated for appropriateness, no tricky images happening here.
And it's all tied to the yearbook. When the book comes out THEN the magic begins as everyone grabs their own mobile device and snaps pictures of head shots in the book, looking to see what stories were told by everyone. Distribution Day will never be the same again.
And yearbook staffs will also have the chance to attach extra digital images to any page in the book - mark a trigger image on a page, anyone snaps the image with their mobile device and the staff's images pop up on the device. It's a chance for LOTS more storytelling tied to your book.
In this most insane of school years, here's a chance for staffs to not only tell MANY MANY more stories, it also offers any student at a Jostens yearbook school the chance to tell their own story. And that story (and their images) will be saved for years to be checked out by whatever device they have at that time.
Personally I can't wait to start promoting and using Yearbook+, and we'll start doing that soon. In this most epic of school years, we're about to create the most epic of yearbooks.