Yearbooks get a 21st century makeover

Yearbooks get a 21st century makeover   By Dana Dean

St. Louis (KSDK) -- Graduation season is here. And for students, yearbooks are an annual rite of passage. But all the anticipation can lead to disappointment, if there are few photos of yourself, but now there is a trend that puts you in control. 

The new yearbook is actually about you and gets built online. Students can create custom pages online. The pages get printed only in their copy of the yearbook.

Companies that print these custom yearbooks are breaking tradition by letting each and every student have a say in the outcome. Students can put as many pictures of themselves as they want in their yearbook. TreeRing is one of the companies doing this.

Yearbook committees are still in charge of the core yearbook, but all students get two free pages to customize and can add more pages if they want. NewsChannel 5 knows of at least nine schools in Missouri trying out this new kind of yearbook, including McKinley Classical Junior Academy in St. Louis. Schools don't have to make a minimum order, which can save money if they don't sell enough. The cost is about the same as a traditional yearbook.

"It's cool because you're not limited to the amount of memories in the yearbook," said Mykal Dean, a student. "You can pick whatever you want."

"I like to be in as many as I can because you don't want to get a yearbook and you're not in it," said Alyson Perry

READ MORE

Personalized yearbooks let high school students make their mark

One of the most anticipated times of the year in high schools across America is the day when yearbooks arrive. This year, some local schools are turning to a new type of the annual that each student gets to personalize.

One of those students is Sarah Cummings, a sophomore at The Douglass School in Leesburg, who says that getting her yearbook hasn't always been the best experience.

Now, though, she's guaranteed to like her pictures - after all, she picked them.

"I always flip through and make sure my picture looks good, and if it doesn't, I go and cross it out in everyone's yearbook," Sarah said.

This year, the school switched to a new type of yearbook that students can customize. Instead of flipping to find a small picture of herself like in yearbooks of yesteryear, Sarah will have two full pages of personal photos.

"I'm going to put in all the pictures from the day I was born until now," she said.

The switch isn't just for fun, either. The main reason the school switched, they said, is financial. Other companies required the school to buy a minimum number of yearbooks upfront, but many didn't end up being purchased.

That wasted hundreds of dollars and left schools with stacks of yearbooks that were not sold.

"The fact we can order only the number we do sell makes it much more cost-effective for us," Douglass School principal Jack Robinson said.

For the students, though, it's all about having a say in creating their lasting memories; for some to express the things that mean a lot to them, and for other, the people that mean a lot to them.

"I dedicated one whole page to my mom," senior Jessica Redmond said.

Students have until the end of the month to design their pages, and in about three weeks, their personal yearbooks will be ready for each other to sign.  READ MORE

USA Radio Network's Day Break Interviews TreeRing

 USA Radio Network's Day Break host Scott West interviews TreeRing CEO, Aaron Greco.  Scott probes into why so many schools are flocking to the new yearbook company.  Aaron's answer: custom pages for each student, no cost for schools and eco-friendly.

A Minute More National Radio Interview with TreeRing

 A Minute More national radio news program interviews TreeRing CEO, Aaron Greco.  Aaron details why schools are choosing to eliminate their yearbook costs and provide a much better yearbook with TreeRing.  LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW

8 Green Back-to-School Products

TreeRing is bringing yearbooks into the Internet age. These products allow each student to create two pages online that gets printed in just their version of the yearbook.  That’s right, they’re still printed, however, TreeRing does a great job of keeping the printed books as green as possible by only printing books for those that buy them (sounds simple, but most publishers require schools to buy a fixed number leaving many schools with wasted books that the school had to pay for). TreeRing is also dedicated to printing all of its books on recycled paper and the company plants a tree for every book they sell. www.treering.com  READ MORE

Environmentally friendly way to have yearbooks

Remember searching through your school yearbook for pictures of you and your friends? Well, that could be a thing of the past.

A California based company is taking advantage of digital technology to personalize yearbooks. It's all thanks to a new service called TreeRing.

"We use this latest digital printing. So, for TreeRing, we're basically disrupting this multi-billion dollar industry that's been around for a long time with innovation that ends up being better for the student and better for the school," said Aaron Greco, the Co-founder of TreeRing.

TreeRing is different from a traditional yearbook, in that, you're doing it all online, which makes it a lot easier to share pages with other people that are working on the yearbook with you.

You also have the ability to customize the yearbook for your child.

"Our family, what we decided to do, was instead of ordering three different yearbooks, we decided to make a custom page for each of our children so that we could have all three in here, and we added a fourth page with all three of them together so that they could share the yearbook," said Sue Kim-Ahn, a parent.

In recent years, a number of schools in California have cancelled yearbooks because of cost. Now because of TreeRing they're saving a lot of money.

Parents can deal directly with the vendor themselves, and buy the yearbook from the site, only if they want to. TreeRing also plants a tree for every book they print.

A Yearbook That Looks Like Facebook

By Blake Ellis  

Watch the Accompanying CNN Video

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- As graduation day arrives, students will say goodbye to their classmates and teachers. And many are departing without a traditional yearbook to preserve those memories.

State budget cuts and the weak economy are causing elementary schools, middle schools, high schools and colleges across the country to either do away with yearbooks or look for more cost-effective publishing options.

Research firm IBISWorld estimates that the traditional yearbook publishing industry has seen sales to schools decline by 4.7% a year over the past few years.
The decline has come as both public and private schools struggling with insufficient funding put their limited resources toward areas like staffing instead publishing yearbooks -- many of which go unsold, especially in recent years as disposable incomes have suffered.

"Our country is handing out pink slips to teachers right and left, and if it comes down to teachers versus yearbooks, yearbooks are going to lose," said Marc Strohlein, principal at consulting firm Agile Business Logic.

Budget crunch

This is the first year that Indiana's Huntington University isn't offering yearbooks, after budget constraints forced the school to reallocate the $40,000 year it typically spends to publish 750 yearbooks.

"Budgets being what they were and the economy being what it was, forced our hand on this one," said Ron Coffey, Huntington's vice president for community development. "But I think given the economic times, the students are understanding of the difficulties that we and other schools are experiencing."

Students at Mokena Junior High School, in Illinois, won't be taking home yearbooks either, after the school district lost funding for all extracurricular activities this year.
And Blaine High School in Washington is in the same boat, and likely won't be handing out yearbooks next year due to a severe lack of funding for the program.

But while some schools are abolishing the keepsake altogether, others are turning to new online yearbook companies like YearBook Alive, Lulu, Lifetouch and TreeRing.
TreeRing, for example, is an electronic yearbook company that lets schools design yearbooks, giving students the option of viewing them online, or ordering a printed copy for just $12 to $17 per book. More than a million photos have already been uploaded, and more than 50,000 students are using its services.

TreeRing says it is now providing yearbooks for hundreds of schools that would have otherwise eliminated the tradition altogether. Sales have soared 600% since the company launched two years ago.

The company estimates that each school saves an average of $100,000 to $600,000 a year in unnecessary printing costs.

"We just signed on with a school in San Francisco that was losing almost $2,000 a year in leftover books," said Aaron Greco, co-founder of TreeRing. "It's just so crazy, because $2,000 could buy five computers with an education discount."

While the major publishing companies mass produce yearbooks using the traditional -- and expensive -- printing method of offset, electronic printing has improved so much recently that the quality is just as good, said Greco.
The company will also soon introduce an online signing function, so students can digitally sign each other's yearbooks books.

One inner-city elementary school with a large population of lower income students, Alvarado School in San Francisco, wasn't able to afford offering yearbooks at all until it heard about electronic options that don't incur costs on the school.

"Financially, it would have just been ridiculous to try to do it -- the school can't even afford paper and pencils, so to outlay money for a nice-to-have item like a yearbook wasn't even something that was considered," said Tim Smith, a parent and teacher at the school.

This year, nearly half of the school's 484 students bought yearbooks, averaging only about $13 each. The others were still able to create yearbooks, view them online and share them with friends.

Breaking with tradition
Budget crunches aren't the only reason for the shift. Huntington University's Coffey said while the school's budget crunch was the main culprit, students are simply more interested in reliving school memories with photos and comments online.
Electronic yearbooks give students the ability to customize pages, and share them using social networking sites.

"The personalization makes it into something about the student, not just the school," said Greco. "We're seeing a death of the traditional yearbook and an age of the personalized yearbook."
Coffey wonders whether social media and Facebook will eventually replace yearbooks altogether.

"Our view is that interest in yearbooks has waned to some degree," he said. "It's not that no students are interested, but with the advent of Facebook and other social networking opportunities, these are often more readily available and interesting venues than the old yearbook world."

But the disappearance of such a long-standing tradition is always hard for some people to accept.
"The tradition is the biggest factor -- it's always hard for students to think of life without it," said Coffey. 

READ MORE 

Good idea: DIY yearbooks

As my son's preschool years get further behind us, I can see that some of the special memories we had are beginning to fade. One of his teachers produced a very sweet photo album for each graduating child in which there were many group pictures, but also greater focus on the child for whom the album was put together. We get it out now and then.
Isn't a personalized yearbook for each kid the ideal scenario? When I look at my high school yearbook, there are only a few pictures of me and my friends. TreeRing.com is a Bay Area start-up that is addressing that issue. There are a certain number of pages that are for everyone in the school and then some that are dedicated to -- or designed by -- every  child. The resulting yearbook is an actual printed book, but a different version is ordered for each student.
For example, everyone's book would have the school picture or class photo pages, but only Julian would have the page that I create all about him. If his friend Maia's mom makes her pictures public in the TreeRing system, I can add those to my book for Julian. Parents can insert numerous personalized pages.
Three schools in Oakland have begun using TreeRing to produce their yearbooks: Ress Academy,Joaquin Miller Elementary, and North Oakland Community Charter School.
It may be too late this year for many schools, but if your preschool runs through the summer, perhaps exploring TreeRing is worthwhile.  READ MORE

Cathy Brooks of Blog Talk Radio's The Conversation covers TreeRing Yearbooks

by Cathy Brooks on The ConversationThe Conversation takes a seasonal bent. Memorial Day has come and gone, which means it's time to start thinking about summer - the end of the school year and the start of fun and frolic. Today's guests tackle two interesting summer-oriented themes.
One of the most emblamatic things about ending a school year is the yearbook, but sadly due to costs many schools are reducing or even removing this staple of school life. Not if TreeRing has anything to say about it. CEO and Co-Founder Aaron Greco joins the show along with literacy specialist Petey Berman and an 8th grader, Daysi, to talk about the way this old time school practice is getting a new life.

Personalizable School Yearbooks at Zero Cost to Schools

Posted by Sophie Lange.  Managing our school yearbook on top of my teaching responsibilities always used to feel like a chore.  It was stressful to use the antiquated computers and design software available at my school, and ensuring that we included enough photos of each student was stressful. But new book design technology from yearbook company TreeRing.com has changed everything. TreeRing's design software is very intuitive and there are all kinds of beautiful page backgrounds and templates to choose from and customize.  Additionally, the software is web-based so my yearbook team can work on the book from home if need be. TreeRing delivered our school’s yearbooks last week and so many students were elated.  As usual, our yearbook features all the school-wide activities, campus highlights and a class portrait of each student.  But there’s a twist – each yearbook is personalized to include a few pages dedicated to the student receiving the book. This option was available to all families, and more than 90% of those who ordered a book decided to personalize it.
It is palpable how much more excited and proud of their yearbooks our students are this year. Students have fun exchanging notes and signatures as always, and now they can also share photos of family trips, Halloween costumes, and holiday traditions that are specific to them.  It’s like each student’s own experience is validated. TreeRing’s process makes it possible to capture individual memories in this collective school artifact.  It’s not necessary to be the most popular or pretty girl – and the boys don’t have to be captain of the football team – just to have their experiences represented.
Another plus is that our school no longer has to pre-order or pre-pay for yearbooks - all parents order them directly online.  It's been wonderful to be taken out of the check collecting business!  They have a very easily to understand website in case you want more info.
It was easy for me to convince our principal to switch yearbook providers because signing up with TreeRing.com is no cost to the school.  And the company even plants a tree in a partnership with the nonprofit organization Trees for the Future for each book purchased.
What a fantastic way to bring the yearbook tradition into the current era of technology, and to make sure each kid’s experience is represented in the copy that they take home!  Thank you, TreeRing.  READ MORE

Create your own yearbook with treering.com

Morning News show, Everyday w/ Libby AND Natalie, on KWGN-CW in Denver, CO discusses how cool TreeRing yearbooks are.

Personalize your own Yearbook with TreeRing

Have you ever noticed that school yearbooks only have about 2 photos of your child? Recently, I’ve discovered a company that is trying to change that and personalize yearbooks. It’s calledwww.TreeRing.com, and it allows the yearbook team to create a bulk of the yearbook online, and each student or parent creates their own personalized pages with photos and memories from the past year. Upon completion, parents purchase the yearbook and hard copies are delivered to the school to keep up with the school spirit.
Because families create and order their yearbooks directly online through TreeRing, schools no longer have to pre-purchase and resell yearbooks, an antiquated and wasteful practice that regularly leaves schools with unsold books and lots of wasted money. TreeRing’s innovative automated process eliminates the financial burden on schools to pay upfront fees for conventional yearbooks. TreeRing even plants a tree in honor of each yearbook sold.
Like the growth rings of a tree, each memory in a TreeRing yearbook is marked in a student’s personalized copy. The memories, accomplishments and activities of each student's life are capture and preserved, so that years from now they'll look back at their TreeRing yearbook and remember all of their great times they had each school year.  READ MORE

Yearbook Dorks Lose Iron Grip on Content With Customizable, Crowdsourced Books

Crowdsourced, personalized, and cheap--it's a yearbook for the Internet age.

BY DAVID ZAX

Technology gives, and technology takes away. The digital age has brought us so much--tablets! Facebook!--but as a result, old and declining technologies seem to be walking around with targets on their foreheads. This is increasingly true in schools, which have been jumping on the digital bandwagon of late. Each day seems to bring a new report of how the iPad, for instance, will be ousting an obsolete paper-based technology: the textbook, thenotebook.  

And what of the yearbook, that paper-based technology that almost seems designed to be obsolete? When we flip through them, it's to laugh at the past, its funny fashions, its dated buzz phrases, its unfortunate braces. Surely Facebook, which keeps people in touch and helps them share photos and memories, has delivered the fatal blow to that annual compendium of awkwardness that is the yearbook? 

Think again. A company called TreeRing offers what it calls "yearbooks for the Internet generation"--actual, printed, physical books, albeit with a digital twist.  

A traditional yearbook is made entirely by a school's self-selecting squadron of nerds. TreeRing's yearbook brings everyone in on the fun. While 80% of the yearbook is still made by the school's yearbook team, 10% is crowd-created.  

The books that go out, then, are 90% identical. What about the remaining 10%? At the high school I graduated from before Facebook was a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg's eye, only the seniors counted themselves lucky enough to get half a page to create themselves (with maybe a bit of extra vanity content in the form of embarrassing advertisements bought by grandparents). Underclassmen got nothing. But in the Facebook-enabled age of self-casting, such a meager fraction simply won't do. To that end, the final 10% of TreeRing's yearbook is personalized, created entirely by the individual who will wind up with that particular book.  

It's all managed online, with simple drag-and-drop tools, and you can source your photos from places where they're already likely to be: Facebook and Flickr, for instance.  

The Internet, vanity, social media, crowd-sourcing--TreeRing has all the major bases of modernity covered, then, right? But something's missing... Oh, right: green cred! Don't worry: TreeRing plants a tree for every book sold. 

The whole scheme winds up saving everyone money, too, because TreeRing only prints as many copies as are demanded. A slim, 20-page softcover can cost as little as $10 or less (though a more standard bulky hard-cover, hundreds of pages long, can run up to $60 or considerably more). A virtual copy of the book lives online, meaning even if they lose their printed copy, your classmates can still laugh at your dated hairdo years hence.  READ MORE 

TR Press Release: District Administration Magazine Awards TreeRing 2010 Readers’ Choice Top 100 Product

District Administration Magazine Awards TreeRing 2010 Readers’ Choice Top 100 Product

District Administration—the most-read magazine of America’s school district leaders—announces TreeRing as a recipient of the Readers’ Choice Top 100 Products of 2010.

Redwood City, CA – December 2, 2010.— Readers of District Administration are the top public school administrators in the country, and they know from experience what works and what does not work within their districts. As part of its annual award program, District Administration asked its readers to nominate the hardware, software, books and materials, Web sites, or facilities products that have made a positive difference in their districts in 2010.  TreeRing’s customizable yearbooks that eliminate costs for school’s earned the distinction this year in its first time nominated.

The winning products were determined by the quantity of nominations received per product as well as evaluating the quality of readers’ nominations and explanations. The 2010 winners were selected from hundreds of nominations received over the last six months, a significant increase in participation from the previous year. “These product recommendations included extensive descriptions from school administrators of how these products are used in their districts, making it very challenging to choose the top 100 products. We hope these products, and their accompanying testimonials, will act as a valuable resource for our readers,” says District Administration’s editor in chief, Judy Faust Hartnett.

“This year’s winners were a very diverse group of products, ranging from classroom resources to district-level management tools,” says Kurt Eisele-Dyrli, products editor. “Many of them, from online assessments and notification systems to thin clients and projectors, enabled readers to do more with less, which reflects the challenging times faced by many school systems.”

“It is an incredible honor to receive District Administration’s Top 100 Product award.  It’s quite humbling to be mentioned alongside Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle as the best products of the year for schools.  The excitement our customers have for our product drive us to continue to improve the product and revolutionize how yearbooks are created and purchased.” said Kevin Zerber, TreeRing Co-Founder.

TR Press Release: Treering Earns Tech & Learning’s 2010 Award Of Excellence

Treering Earns Tech & Learning’s 2010 Award Of Excellence

Redwood City, CA –November 24, 2010 - TreeRing Corporation, a company that creates yearbooks for the Internet generation, today announced that it won Tech & Learning’s 2010 Award of Excellence for its customizable yearbook product.  Tech & Learning magazine annually names the best education technology products as winners in its prestigious 28-year-old recognition program. A panel of more than 30 educators, who tested more than 140 entries, chose the winners.

Tech & Learning's Awards of Excellence program has been recognizing outstanding education technology products for nearly three decades. With a solid reputation in the industry as a long-standing, high-quality program, the AOE recognizes both the "best of the best" and creative new offerings that help educators in the business of teaching, training and managing with technology. All entries are given a rigorous test-driving by qualified educators in several rounds of judging. Products are also carefully screened by the T&L editorial team. Evaluation criteria include the following: quality and effectiveness ease of use, creative use of technology, and suitability for use in an educational environment.

Brady McCue, TreeRing Co-Founder, said, “It’s a huge honor to be recognized by such a prestigious award.  Our goal when we started the company was to provide a way for student’s to better capture their memories and remove the yearbook financial burden for schools.  We still have a lot of work to do to make the product even better, but this is a great recognition of our progress so far.”

Article: Dallas Morning News - Technology lets students, parents lay out personalized pages in high school yearbooks

Technology lets students, parents lay out personalized pages in high school yearbooks

By KAREL HOLLOWAY / The Dallas Morning News 

Yearbooks can be a big rush or a real letdown.

Lots of pictures of your child and it's great. Just the formal class picture and maybe a glimpse of a cute face at the back of a group and the big book seems a waste.

Yearbook companies are springing up to help avoid disappointment, offering schools and parents a digital way to make the books more personal.

TreeRing, headquartered in California, says it was the first company to offer schools personalized pages in yearbooks. Parents, or the students if they are old enough, can lay out their own pages with photos and text and add them to the standard book.

Co-founder Chris Pratt remembers his daughter bringing home her book with just two photos of her.

"It didn't capture her memories," said Aaron Greco, who started the company with Pratt.

The company started last year, using a digital process to offer personalized pages. Greco said other companies now are springing up to offer similar services. Several area schools, including some in Rockwall and Wylie, are using TreeRing, he said, though he would not say how many clients the company has.

The digital process is called print on demand.

Instead of setting up pages and then printing them on a large offset press, TreeRing pages are similar to documents on any computer. Pages can be added or deleted almost as easily as attaching a file to e-mail. Books can be cheaply printed, one individualized copy at a time.

That means the yearbooks can be truly personalized. Schools using the system no longer have to place large orders, or large deposits, in advance.

Schools create 80 percent of the pages online – this is the traditional part of the book. But parents automatically receive other pages they can use as they want, uploading pictures and text of their child.

Once the book is finished, parents, students or others, like grandparents, can order the book they want. It can have no personalized pages or dozens.

Because of the streamlined digital process, the books are often 20 to 30 percent cheaper than other yearbooks, Greco said.

"One mom that had three kids at the school had 16 pages for each kid." Greco said. "The pages were beautiful."

Parent volunteer Tonya Fenoglio is in charge of the yearbook at Rockwall's Hartman Elementary School. She said TreeRing seemed an easy choice.

This is the first year Fenoglio has been the yearbook coordinator. She searched the Internet to see if there was a better option than the company the school had used for years.

She found TreeRing and liked the ability to personalize pages and the lower cost.

"All the other yearbooks seemed really outdated," she said.

She has already created the pages for her daughter. They include pictures with her friends and activities from first grade. Other parents have gone online to finish their students' pages as well.

Fenoglio says she likes the chance for parents to add personal details such as teacher names and important days.

"They'll kind of have a Life at Grace Hartman Elementary School," she said.

Article: New York Times - A Yearbook Dedicated to Inclusion

A Yearbook Dedicated to Inclusion

By WINNIE HU

EXCERPT FROM ARTICLE:

A growing number of schools, including Scotch Plains-Fanwood and Baldwin Senior High School, on Long Island, are also using new publishing technology offered through companies like... TreeRing to give every student the option of personalizing a yearbook by adding pages to fill with photos and memories, at little or no additional cost. Scotch Plains-Fanwood’s yearbook advisers, Julie Whitty and Amy Rutkowski, said they hoped the customized pages and more inclusive approach would increase their sales; in recent years, about half of the students bought yearbooks, which start at $75 this year.  READ FULL ARTICLE ON NYT 

Article: Blog, A Virtual Unknown - A New Kind of Memory

A new kind of memory
Posted by Jim Willis

Indelible memories of those innocent years of grade school, awkward years of junior high, the posturing years of high school, and the challenging years of college are found between the covers of your old yearbooks.

You remember: those are the tomes filling that 60-pound box you’ve been hauling around all your life, transferring unopened from one attic the next, defying you to actually set them out on the curb on trash day.

The rituals

One of the annual rituals of school days was the yearbook signing when you passed the books around to sign and be signed, getting back the most intimate comments from people you didn’t even know you knew, and getting rather bland sentiments from friends you thought were intimates.

Later, as a parent, you were eager to see the book that set you back $25 or more, only to find your Valicia had forgotten to have her class mug shot taken and was seen only once in the book in the blurry background of a pep rally shot.

And, of course, you hoped if young Terrence were voted something like “Most Likely to Succeed,” that he wouldn’t wind up disappointing American society and becoming a Charles Manson later in life.

Economic victims

So school yearbooks can be anxiety-provoking, but they can also be a lot of fun. Sadly, however, yearbooks are also among the victims of shrinking school and family economies. The good news is that help has arrived from the digital era of communications, which we are calling the Virtual Unknown.

At the university where I teach, Indiana’s Ball State, the award-winning Orient yearbook has been gone for several years now. At my former university, California’s Azusa Pacific, the Student Government Association would like it dropped and for student money to go elsewhere. Only a president nostalgic for a past era, is keeping it alive.

For awhile, many schools tried shifting from the expensive hard-cover books to video yearbooks. Some still are using that and publishing books digitally on CDs or DVDs, choosing to forego printed yearbooks altogether. The thought is that videos, sights, and sounds are better — and save more trees — than printed books.

But a lot of schools are taking digital to another level and letting students customize their own books.

Print on demand

Some of these schools, like the Chahta-Ima Elementary School in suburban New Orleans, are going to a new kind of print-on-demand yearbook to save costs. Companies like TreeRing Corp. , based in Redwood City, California, use Internet-based technology that saves schools money by letting them print only as many copies as needed while letting a wider group of students, faculty and parents collaborate in the process.

Other companies offering these print-on-demand services include ones like Lulu, Ziblio, and Lifetouch.

Casey Gleason, principal of Chahta-Ima told the San Francisco Chronicle, “We wanted the school to be able to have a yearbook for its historical significance,” said Gleason, whose school has served several generations in Lacombe, La. “We wanted to do it at a reasonable cost, but not sacrifice instructional funds for the school.”

Online publishing

TreeRing is a start-up company featuring a publishing model that is catching on in the book industry of printing only the number of books needed by a customer.

It’s too early tell if this model will challenge the traditional school yearbook market, in which publishing companies like Taylor and Jostens dominate. But with more schools abandoning traditional yearbooks, it could.

The publishing of the yearbooks is done entirely online, with students, faculty, and parents able to contribute elements to the book. The class mug-shot pages and student organization pages remain pretty standard, but much of the rest of the book uses the “crowdsourcing” technique of having individuals upload pictures of themselves involved in school or family activities to other pages, for which templates are provided. They can even pop in pictures of news or cultural events during the year that were meaningful for them.

Personalized books

The result is a kind of personalized yearbook that insures your kid doesn’t have to lay out money to buy a book in which he/she is only pictured once or twice. So each book may be somewhat different from the next, but you pay for only your personalized book; not someone else’s. Another plus is that TreeRing pledges to plant one tree for every yearbook printed.

Very Californian and very cool.

No unsold books

It’s also cool for the schools and their budgets, because instead of being stuck with a couple thousand dollars of unsold books at the end of the year, there are no unsold books because a book doesn’t get printed by TreeRing until they receive payment from the student or family. The books are actually printed by an Indiana company contracted by TreeRing. Most of them are done in soft cover and costs can vary from roughly $10 to $15 each, which is cheaper than most traditional hard-cover yearbooks.

With these new publishing options available, yearbooks will hopefully be around for many years to come.

A silent prayer

But you still hope that “most likely to succeed” will refer to your young Terrence doing well in an endeavor that is considered legal and, who knows, maybe even ethical.
READ MORE

TV: CBS News Covers TreeRing Custom Yearbooks at St Timothy School

CBS San Francisco (KCBS) news covers TreeRing's no-cost for school, customizable yearbooks at St Timothy School in San Mateo, CA. Interview with TreeRing co-founder, Aaron Greco, St Timothy School Principal, Monica Miller and Teacher/Parent Margaret Flynn.

Article: Fox News - Customizing Children's School Yearbooks

Published : Monday, 18 Oct 2010, 10:07 AM MDT

MESA, Ariz. - It's the classic yearbook picture you have to love - but wouldn't it be nice to have more than just the one picture?

A new yearbook company called Tree Ring allows parents to add custom pages to their child's yearbook - anything from the first day of school to their favorite pets.

Red Mountain Ranch Elementary school is Mesa is trying it out this year.

"That's been the biggest challenge for us..is to try to include every student..more than just their individual portrait," said Red Mountain Ranch's Brenda Sibley.

"I thought it was pretty cool because then you can finally have your own personalized yearbook," said Chloe Smith.

It's easy to do. If your school signs up to have Tree Ring print the yearbook, all you have to do is go to the company's web site and plug in pictures to a template. The first two pages are free, but it's $3.99 for each additional page.  READ MORE

Article: CW News - School Days Online

Amanda Salinas, The 33 News
SACHSE, TX - We talk online, bank online, and stand in line for hours for the latest digital gadget. Now the school yearbook is finding its way online. More North Texas schools are making their memories digital.

On any given day, you can find Karen Andiel on the campus of Whitt Elementary School in Sachse. Andiel is like most PTA moms. She always has a camera in hand, and is ready to capture on film the moments of her children's lives. But many of the pictures she takes these days include more than just her children. Andiel is the yearbook editor for Whitt Elementary School.
"I've had so much fun. I'm getting to be at the school a lot, and getting to know the kids and the teachers and the office staff."
No cutting, or pasting, or printing involved. Just upload a picture, click and go!
"With Facebook and the iPhone, everything is so computerized and so digital. It's pretty easy for everyone to figure out, because we're doing it all the time," says Andiel.
Whitt Elementary is one of a several North Texas schools making the move from hardcopy to digital.
"Just drag and drop it on the page," says Brady McCue. McCue is co-founder of TreeRing, a web based system for online academic yearbooks.
"We allow parents to go on our site. They can quickly upload photos and create as many pages as they like."
School administrators say the digital switch makes financial sense. In the past, schools would order hundreds of yearbooks. Many would remain unsold, leaving the school with a hefty bill.
Whitt Elementary principal, Jonathan Slaten tells us this move is perfect for 2010 parents.
"They're doing Facebook everyday," says Slaten. "They are doing everything digitally, and they fully expect that this be digital too."
Karen Andiel has kept all her yearbooks, and often shares those memories with her daughters. It's an experience she hopes to replicate for them.
"I want them to show their kids and laugh at their pictures. Laugh at the way they did their hair, and what they were wearing. It's fun, it's great."
Hard copies don't go away. You can still order a printed version of the yearbook.  Read More