Trello for Yearbook

Vaughn Grisham September 16, 2017

Hello. I'm a yearbook advisor at a small high school in the mountains of Far West Texas. 

I've used Trello in the past to manage my own personal projects, but I've not used it to manage a collaborative effort such as a yearbook. 

My situation is that I have 11 students who comprise the main yearbook staff. They meet each day for 2 hours to layout pages in Adobe InDesign, and to study for the InDesign certification exam. During the second hour, our 11 photography students come into the same room to take commercial photography. Their role will be to learn Adobe Photoshop (studying for the Adobe Certified Associate exam and learning Photoshop techniques as well as studying photographic techniques via Lynda.com), and to take on photographic assignments delegated by the main yearbook staff.

I am looking for a way for the students to efficiently and effectively manage the complex process of creating a yearbook, and to make sure that things get done. I also want to make sure that things don't fall through the cracks and that each student is pulling his or her weight. 

Anybody out there in a similar situation? I'd appreciate any advice.

Thanks,
Vaughn

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Peter DeWitt
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September 16, 2017

Vaughn, I'm not working with students or a yearbook project but Trello should be able to handle you effort without any problem.  The one point of advice I can offer is separate the different tasks out into separate Trello boards.  It looks like you have a photography group, a layout/design group, and students working toward a certification.  

For the certifications try making each step toward certified a column on the board a each student a card.  That way they can move across as they complete each step/training.

For the other teams, you could use a more traditional board layout of Todo / In Progress / Done and then create cards for everything that needs completion.  Assigning the tasks to the kids will help with accountability.  Just keep each card simple.  It'll be easier to track work/effort that way.

Anyway, those are my ideas.  Hope they help!

Gregory Van Den Ham
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September 16, 2017

Trello has several power-ups that are available, including better management of due dates.

Take a little bit of time and look through the power-ups and there's certainly some there to help.  https://trello.com/power-ups

sfeldman_trello
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October 19, 2017

Hi Vaughn,

What a great question! A yearbook is a hugely complicated visual project that is perfect for Trello. Certainly you could use one board for it, but I'd suggest making two boards -- one for project tracking and one for yearbook layout.

As cards are done (e.g., photos or club pages) move them to the layout board where each list is a page (or two page spread). This will give you an easy way to see the "yearbook" as it's coming together and quickly identify gaps/problems. You can also easily rearrange pages by dragging the columns.

I agree with Peter about splitting out the other groups and certification program into their own boards.

I'd also recommend a few additional resources:

I'd love to hear how your project comes along, and please share your learnings back with us!

Sam

Monique vdB
Community Manager
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January 16, 2018

@Vaughn Grisham, how is this going for you? 

Vaughn Grisham January 17, 2018

It's going well, thanks. It's just a matter of making sure students actually look at Trello. I project our yearbook's Trello page onto a classroom wall, and it stays up there for the duration of the yearbook class each day. 

Monique vdB
Community Manager
Community Managers are Atlassian Team members who specifically run and moderate Atlassian communities. Feel free to say hello!
January 17, 2018

I was the editor-in-chief of my high school yearbook so I am enjoying visualizing this! We didn't have Trello as it was *mphfygl* years ago. I think our most advanced piece of technology was an Xacto knife. 

FYI the reason I saw your post is that thanks to the tags, it popped up in our new Education interest group which launched yesterday. There's a kickoff thread here in case you're interested in connecting with fellow educators.

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