Digital publishing for today’s students

In PUBLISHING
10 August 2023
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What do “digital natives” have to learn about digital skills? The generation of children in school today have grown up in a connected world. Smartphones, social networks and internet culture have been part of life for many as long as they can remember. These young digital natives are defined by their comfort with technology and use digital tools intuitively. Unlike their older “digital immigrant” teachers, today’s students do not need to be taught how to log on.

Given this digital intuition, it makes sense that technology has found a central place in the classroom. Teachers increasingly use connected computers, tablets and even smartphones in lessons around the world. Students might be asked to research, work together with classmates on a group project or turn in homework online.

Digital publishing offers practical tools for students to share their work while also learning valuable digital skills. These skills go beyond the simple use of technology to help build students’ awareness of some of the biggest issues in our information society: accessibility, media literacy, digital community and understanding code. Read on to find out how digital publishing sharpens these key skills in the modern classroom.

Paperless pros

Although the future is probably not 100% paperless, plenty of everyday life has moved to the screen. Digital natives are more likely to expect experiences like shopping, banking and entertainment to be accessible online and reading is no exception. That’s why many publishers make a wide variety of titles aimed at younger readers available on Calaméo for parents and kids to sample.

As digital natives head off to school, digitally published textbooks can represent an important source of information. Online course material meets students where they are: on their phones, using Google to research their homework. By publishing textbooks digitally, educational publishers can ensure that digital natives find reliable facts through search and maybe even remind them of the paper copy sitting in their backpack.

Publishers can also offer convenience to students at ease with digital books, which are searchable, downloadable and impossible to forget in their rooms. With college textbook prices in particular at an all-time high, online editions can be an especially attractive option for today’s students. Since these publications live in the cloud, course information is accessible in and out of the classroom. Instead of staying buried deep in the clunky platforms of enterprise education applications, learning material can be consulted anywhere, anytime.

Critical thinkers

The enormous amount of information available on the web may seem particularly amazing to those old enough to remember starting homework assignments with a stack of library books. All of this information poses new risks to digital natives. In the age of fake news, 91% of teachers think that evaluating the quality of information online is an “essential” skill for students to learn.

Digital publishing platforms can be a great tool for teaching media literacy, or the ability to understand how information is communicated. While researching online, students need to know how to consider more than just the search results. Factors such as the format, the publisher and the source of information are essential to judging its quality: newspaper article or wiki? Amateur or expert? Facts or opinion? Digital publications are a rich medium for students to explore and analyze, providing diverse materials published on a huge range of topics.

Learning to think critically about sources matters not only when reading, but also when writing. One study found that a third of high school students admitted to copying from the Internet in their homework. Tools like Calaméo’s Editor let students add external links to their digitally published presentations, reports and projects to cite their sources.

Learning communities

Digital publishing is also an opportunity for today’s students to become part of a type of online community different from those than they may already belong to. Internet users younger than 25 are more concerned than older users about privacy on the web. But unlike social media networks, digital publishing platforms do not restrict interaction to friends only. This openness can teach students valuable lessons about being part of a global community.

Once a digital native becomes a digital publisher, she adds her own voice to the vast resources available online. Students publishing on Calaméo also have the option of creating private publications, which are not indexed for search. Since how to approach online privacy is in the news and on the minds of young people, students should decide carefully when to publish privately and when they want to join a worldwide conversation.

Whether public or private, digital publications are the site of innovation in teaching and learning. From educators publishing lesson plans to student newspapers distributing online editions, digital publishing brings both local and global communities together. Some inspired teachers are even using digital publishing to grade assignments, reviewing the homework that individual students publish and leaving comments with feedback.

Future developers

Although digital publishing is a great tool for teaching in almost any subject, one of the ways it is most useful is for students who are beginning to learn coding skills. Digital natives may feel immediately comfortable with technology, but comfort does not mean an ability to code or even understand what’s happening behind the user interface. By 2020, an estimated 1.4 million software development jobs will go unfilled in the US alone because there are not enough qualified candidates.

Students everywhere can benefit from reviewing the technical basics of digital publishing. Uploading different file types to Calaméo is simple, but today’s students need to know what it means to publish in HTML5 and what that allows you to do. Studying up on the differences between a PDF, digital publishing and file sharing services is a good place to start.

To gain practical skills, beginner students can try their hands at development activities using digital publishing. Embedding a publication in a student-created webpage is a perfect project for learning about Iframes, a key building block of many websites, while creating a fully responsive Library widget display may be appropriate for more advanced students. Students interested in design can take advantage of Calaméo’s uniquely adaptable viewer by coding their own viewer Themes.

Final marks

Digital publishing makes it easy for students to access course materials and offers teachers many possibilities for encouraging them to develop media literacy, participate in an online information community and improve tech know-how. When it comes to helping digital natives strengthen important digital skills, Calaméo is at the top of the class.

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PUBLISHING

Innovation in publishing: a brief history

In PUBLISHING
6 October 2022

What comes to mind when you hear the name Gutenberg? If you work on a website, you might think about the blogging platform WordPress and its Gutenberg content editor. If you’re a fan of e-books, you might think of the Project Gutenberg library of free titles. And if you’re a fan of the Police Academy movies, you might think of Steve Guttenberg.

But only one Gutenberg was the original tech mogul who disrupted the publishing industry. In 1439, this German inventor developed a kind of press that made it possible to print text in multiple copies. Of course, like many tech icons, Gutenberg was actually the second person to invent his device. Although it wasn’t widely adopted at the time, Bi Sheng created moveable type 400 years earlier in China.

It may seem funny to talk about books like a technology, the same way we talk about smartphones and apps. Despite their low-tech material of paper and ink, books are technology: an object invented to store information. That’s why we’re taking a look at how innovation has shaped the history of publishing, from ancient eras right up to today.

Handmade books

Before Bi Sheng and Gutenberg’s printing inventions, every single book around the world was made by hand. These manuscripts, or hand-written texts, came in two main formats. Scrolls had writing on a single, rolled-up surface. On the other hand, a codex would look much more like a modern book. They had multiple pages inside a pair of wooden boards. But compared to printed books, very few manuscripts existed.

In large part, handmade books were rare because of the time, effort and resources required to create them. Not only did you need someone who knew how to write—not easy to find thousands of years ago—you’d also need something to write on and with. Some common materials included clay and wax tablets, papyrus paper and parchment. Besides quill and ink, styluses and calames were also used to write. And once you gathered the materials and found a scribe, it could take years to copy out a text.

Because books and writing were advanced technologies most people never encountered in the handmade era, cultural information was stored in other ways. For example, the art and decoration on buildings like churches told visual stories to their viewers. Music, folktales and good old memorization were also important forms for sharing knowledge. However, the arrival of the printing press was about to revolutionize books. 

Publishing revolutions

Printing wasn’t special to the printing press, but the concept of moveable type was. For centuries, artists knew to carve a flat image onto a block of wood, cover it with ink and press it against a paper page to make a print. Gutenberg and Bi Sheng’s innovation was to produce images of individual letters, or characters. Then, these letters were arranged into the text of a page and set into a frame for printing.

Although it might not sound like much, this moveable type technology meant that printing a page took minutes instead of weeks. Printing a book of 100 pages took weeks, not years. Plus, making copies was simple. As a result, more and more books entered circulation. Books held more information and, in Europe, more people read them throughout the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Publishers began to print and sell books on a bigger scale than ever.

One reason why the audience for books exploded? Education expanded dramatically in many places across the world. A growing number of people could read and they bought books. History, science, fiction, philosophy, dictionaries, travel guides—publishers offered books in every genre as printing technology advanced. Presses improved, paper became cheaper and by the end of the 20th century, the business of making and selling books had spread into a global industry worth billions of dollars.

Digital experiments

But the story of publishing innovation doesn’t end there. The invention of computers and the Internet created new tools for writing. From the clay tablets and calames to desktops and digital formats, another huge technological shift has been changing publishing over the past several decades. Unlike printing, however, digital publishing has taken lots of different directions as audiences try new experiences.

For example, publishing books on CD-ROM was a major trend in the 1990s. As old-fashioned as that sounds today, CD-ROM publishing let users access a large amount of information easily. In fact, an early digital encyclopedia set was priced 86% cheaper than the equivalent 21 volumes of printed books. And the format could include multimedia audio, video and links.

While CD-ROMs were replacing traditional encyclopedias, more experiments were happening online. Twitter launched in 2006 and by 2008, people were using it to write novels 140 characters at a time. The Kindle launched in 2007 and by 2010, e-books made up an important part of sales. New channels, formats and ideas are still developing and evolving online very quickly. After all, who needs a CD-ROM reference publication when you have Wikipedia?

To be continued

In short, the book is a technology that has been renewed to meet the needs of readers for hundreds and thousands of years. As publishers face digital challenges in the 21st century, there’s plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the future. Handmade, machine-printed or digital: books are always adapting so that more people can access them—and the knowledge inside.

Read this article in our 7th issue of Calaméo Magazine, as well as many others on the theme of renewal and innovation:

And if you haven’t read all the other issues of Calaméo Magazine yet, you can find them right here.

PUBLISHING

[CHECKLIST] Develop your digital publishing strategy

In PUBLISHING
30 July 2020

If you have important content to share online, then you need a digital publishing strategy. This can be a part of larger business plan or as simple as a set of guidelines. Not sure where to get started? Our simple checklist will help you develop your digital publishing strategy, no matter what you want to achieve.

Define your goals

First, think about the objectives you have for your content. Don’t rush this step—it’s the most essential information you’ll need to establish your strategy. Because the rest will follow from here, take some time to define your digital publishing goals.

These might include:

  • Improving your site’s SEO
  • Building your business’s brand
  • Communicating with colleagues
  • Generating leads
  • Sharing sales material with prospects

Above all, make sure to prioritize. It’s normal to have multiple goals, but challenging to accomplish them all at once. Be honest with yourself about your top objectives and remember that different types of content can have different purposes.

Choose your channels

Now that you have a clear idea of your goals, you can select the channels that you will use to publish your digital content. Maintaining an active presence on as many channels as possible is a good idea. However, keep your priorities in mind and focus on the channels that match your most important goals.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media channels can be a great fit for sharing content that builds your business’s brand. Research which kinds of content perform best on the platforms that interest you. For example, Twitter is often associated with content related to news, while compelling visuals are a must for Instagram.

BLOG

A blog is a key channel for content aimed at improving your site’s SEO and generating leads. What’s more, blogs are now easy to set up and manage. If you’re starting from scratch, figure out the blogging platform that best meets your needs. If you already have a blog, do a quick audit to see the content that is succeeding and where there’s room for improvement.

LONG-FORM CONTENT

Some types of more complex content may not make sense to publish as a simple blog article. This is especially true for sales material, like a prospectus or brochure, and internal communications material, like an employee handbook. Because this content tends to be longer and have more striking graphics, it should be available to share from an intranet or digital publishing platform.

Create a production schedule

Once you have decided on the channels that work best for your goals, it’s time to create a production schedule for your digital content. Make a list of the subjects that you will cover and plan the frequency and format of your publishing. In other words, decide how often you want to publish to each of your channels and what kinds of content you will create.

Most importantly, be realistic about how much you will be able to publish on the channels that you will use. Don’t forget that some content is faster to produce than others. For example, a blog post won’t take as much time to write as a white paper. But when in doubt, pick quality over quantity. Publishing less is a smart strategy if your content is interesting, well-written and attractive.

Determine promotion needs

Even amazing content can benefit from an extra push to connect with your online audience. Although you’ve already chosen the right channels for your goals, other channels still offer great opportunities for promoting your content. You could post a link to your most recent blog article on your social media channels and reach new followers. Or you could embed long-form content on your blog for readers to discover. In addition, email newsletters and paid advertisements are two popular options to consider.

For each type of content on your production schedule, select at least one way that you will use to distribute it.

Decide measurement metrics

Analyzing the impact of your content is a critical step to develop your digital publishing strategy.  Before you start hitting that Post button, look at the goals you defined at beginning of this checklist. To know whether you achieve them, you’ll need to establish which data points will be most relevant.

For instance, you may want to measure how many times your content has been downloaded. This may tell you whether it is appealing to readers and allowing you to communicate successfully with colleagues, prospects or leads. With other metrics, such as the number of pages viewed or the conversion rate, you can begin to evaluate the effectiveness of your approach.

Gather data regularly and note the patterns that emerge. As you continue to develop your digital publishing strategy, use these insights to adapt your content and keep moving toward your goals.

Ready to develop your approach to online content? We’ve outlined all the essential steps in one handy digital publishing strategy checklist. Download your copy now and start making the most out of your content.

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