First-Year Online Magazines

About This Project

All first-year students at JMU are required to take a critical reading and writing course, as part of the general education curriculum at the university. In the fall of 2012, Seán McCarthy introduced students to rethinking the way they write by using digital media to create multimodal articles–writing as a flow of media. At the end of the semester, students publish their final articles to the class online magazine.

Every semester more professors learn about the online magazine project and decide to adopt the use of WordPress into their classrooms. As part of my job with CIT, I consult with professors early in the semester to setup a WordPress site for their classes. Throughout the semester, I support faculty and their students with embedding media into their articles and customizing their sites. Near the end of the semester I make classroom visits to help apply a custom site design and structure. The classes collaboratively name their magazines, decide on a theme, choose their color scheme and group their articles under similar categories.