Looking to move your program online and don't know where to start? Or are you ready to move your website to the next level from a free hosting site?

The Texas Association of Journalism Educators and Texas Interscholastic League Press Conference are holding a new media training for advisers August 2-4 in Austin.

Advisers will leave with a website that uses Wordpress as content-management system, an overview of how to teach online journalism and organize a convergence staff. The three-day course will also cover editing audio and audio slideshows. Lunch is included. For more information or to register, visit http://www.texasjteachers.com.

http://texasjteachers.com/file_uploads/PDFs/newmedia.pdf

The fall JEA/NSPA convention will be in Kansas City Nov. 11-14. If you're planning to attend, we'd love to have you help those in attendance by speaking about the topic so many are wanting help with these days: Digital Media. This can be anything from Web sites and broadcasting to multimedia or Google Docs. You could do a session on programs like Issuu or you could host a session on staff structure of a digital newsroom. You could do a session by yourself. Pair up with a friend. Or even organize a panel for the session.

Once again, HSBJ is partnering with The National Press Club in Washington D.C. to offer a series of online classes for both professional teachers and professional broadcasters. The "Getting into Multimedia" courses are each about 10 hours of work, including class time and independent work. While the class itself runs three days, students will have ten days to complete their work assignements. For teachers, Continuing Education Credits (CEUs) are available from Kent State University.

The fee for each course is $50. National Press Club members can receive a discounted registration of $30.

Written by David Schwartz and Robert Gutsche Jr.

For two days last week, the two of us, both journalism educators, avid news-users and news men, attempted to use Apple's iPad for all of our electronic communications needs.

We put away the laptops, pads of paper and our pens.

Why? To see how our media usage changed as educators, as journalists and consumers, and to try to determine the iPad's possible place in scholastic and mainstream journalism.

It worked this way: Robert left his laptop on his desk (he tried futilely to leave it at home), starting at 9 a.m. Our rules were that only as a last resort could he use his own computer -- or anyone else's -- to get his work done. The iPad would have to suffice until 9 a.m. the next day when David would pick it up and do the same.

Both of us tried to abandon our smart phones (David an iPhone, Robert a BlackBerry), except for making and taking calls.

So, for those 24 hours each, we did email, word processing, entering grades for students, blogging and reading books and PDFs. And, of course, we used it for reading media.

Our impressions: