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Thoughts on Creating a Yearbook During a Pandemic

Updated: Apr 29, 2021



This school year my elective was yearbook and when I had applied during junior year this was definitely not the yearbook class I was expecting. This years yearbook has been challenging in various ways, but it has also helped me grow as a person.


Collaboration

Working in teams has been the hardest part of collaborating. For those of you who are unaware, yearbook is split into sections and in those sections are teams of people working on their designated section. For example, there are grade level sections, academic sections, club and orgs section, student life section, and senior tributes. I was put into the student life section, which seemed like it was going to be impossible to do since we could not go out and take photos of other people. The beginning of the year was challenging in what topics to include in the yearbook since a lot had to be changed from previous yearbook. Section's like the Sibling section were replaced with new topics like What Makes AOC Happy. This year's yearbook challenged me to think out of the box which is what brought What Makes AOC Happy, Pets of AOC, What's Cooking AOC, and more into fruition. The team members and I were able to create a unique Student Life section and I soon realized that compared to other sections, Student Life was the easiest since we had the most amount of people to contact. Section's like Sophomore section had limited amounts of people to contact and also limited topic. Regardless, the collaboration was tough because at times there was lack of conversation and it felt lonely despite being in a "group" setting. This was discouraging at times when the team members were not talkative. Collaboration was also missing during the actual work because after we would figure out what to do for the day, the rest of class was spent in silence. Even when I was not put into a breakout room with my group and with the rest of the class listening to announcements from the teacher, it felt lonely. One because on Zoom I could only see the person speaking as well as a few other people, and when the teacher asked fa question few ever responded. To me it seemed like everyone was done with online school so whenever they went on, everyone looked deflated of energy. This has lead to procrastination, but the real culprit to last minute spreads being completed is the inability to get photos.


Getting Photos

Getting photos has been a constant struggle for all sections and has lead to competitions throughout the school to see who submits the most usable photos in an attempt to get a large influx of photos to put in the yearbook, private messaging people asking for photos, following up with people to send new photos due to the photo being too blurry or inadequate for yearbook standards, and more. It was not until the second semester until I realized that instead of waiting for other people to get photos, I could just as easily get photos if I private messaged them. When I first did this I had to find and follow as much AOC people as I could so I would be able to message them. This was something I normally am not comfortable doing, but was willing to do in order to get more photos. A section I did this to was the What's Cooking AOC section of Student Life and in the end I was somehow able to get every other photo to be of a person holding/eating their food and a picture of just food. After the success of getting photos through private messaging I began applying this to other topics in Student Life and was able to get a wide variety of photos. Of course the process was time consuming and required follow up messages and a tedious process of downloading the photo to my phone, emailing to myself, downloading to laptop, uploading to the yearbook, and then finally putting the picture in the appropriate topic.


Creating Yearbook

Creating the yearbook was also another challenge because the software the class was used to (which was already bad) was "updated" to a new one since Adobe Flash Player no longer existed making the software we were using irrelevant. The software company we were using to create the yearbook switched to a slow software that was grainy, laggy, and did I mention slow? When designing spreads and putting in text, it was hard to tell what we were creating or typing since the quality of what we were seeing was horrible. When moving things around or trying to switch to a different topic to work on, the software was sluggish and made work much slower. On top of slow and bad quality software, it would become EVEN more slow when there were a lot of people on it. It made me think of how far behind the technology is for yearbook creation software and wonder who the heck thought this software was the best for creating a yearbook? Regardless, I adjusted to the change and pushed on which sounds like the recurring theme of 2020 and 2021.


The Final Stretch

As of today, my section has finished its section and is able to rest for the next week since the yearbook is due March 11th. But now my main question is what yearbook does for the remainder of the school year because there's still at least 2 more months of school. I am guessing it will become a free period where people can do other work which would not be bad since I like having my mornings (which is when my class meets) open. This would also mean I only have one academic class since I have advisement last. My school is on a block schedule and the way I set up my classes this year was to have 1 high school class on Mondays & Wednesdays and 3 classes on Tuesday's & Thursday's. But I only have one academic class each day which means that other two classes I have are either an elective (yearbook) or advisement (which I basically consider a socializing period).


Thoughts

Overall I would say there have been ups and down's with yearbook. Completing the Student Life section feels rewarding and looking back at our designs make me feel happy. I would say it is one of the best times where the whole team worked together towards one goal. Usually in school projects there is one person who drags the team down, but I can honestly say the team I was put in was the best. In fact numerous time the teacher said that she did not have to worry about our team and section since she knew we were always on top of the ball. If I had to do it all over again, I think I would since the feeling of accomplishment makes up for all the times where I felt like being in yearbook was not worth my time.


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