Yes, Digital Video in the Classroom has now officially been re-named Digital Media in the Classroom and will be appearing regularly as an e-book on a screen near you. As in the formerly printed edition (archived at www.techlearning.com/digitalvideo/), this digital version of DMC will continue to offer a range of tips, resources, research findings, product buying advice, and integration best practice stories from experts in the field. In this premier e-edition, we focus on students as multimedia designers, with author David Balaban's "Radio and TV Production: Elementary!," on page 2, and Amy Poftak's "Award Winning Projects," page 9. Both of these features offer practical information but also wonderful insights into the power of video to inspire and galvanize kids into taking charge of their own learning.
It's our aim to become the communication hub and resource of choice for educators using digital media in schools and other institutions, and to that end, we encourage you to download this e-book for use in your professional development and training sessions. As well, I'd be very interested in hearing any comments or suggestions you might have regarding this or future issues of DMC. You can email those to me at smclester@cmp.com.
Enjoy!
Susan McLester
Editor in chief
DMC's Mission: To provide educators with expert buying tips and best practices for integrating digital media into teaching and learning.
When I tell people I'm a teacher of broadcasting, they usually say, "Oh really? That's' interesting, high school or college?" I say "Neither. I teach at Gordon Parks Academy, a Pre-K-6 school in East Orange, New Jersey named after the first African American to direct a major Hollywood motion picture (Shaft 1972).
The Gordon Parks curriculum was designed with two overall objectives: first, to provide each student media literacy in the areas of motion pictures, television, radio and animation and, second, to enhance the vocabulary, writing and critical thinking skills of students through the production of multi-media projects.
Originally all five hundred students in the school attended media classes once a day, Gradually the program has evolved and now focuses mainly on fourth, fifth and sixth graders. Each class of thirty students is divided in half and attends ten-week sessions five days a week for fifty minutes a day. The first ten weeks focuses on radio history and production. The second on motion picture history and animation. And the final two ten-week blocks are devoted to television theory and production.
Students are exposed to various genres of radio programming such as Orson Welles' infamous drama" War of the Worlds" and early comedies and serials such as Burns and Allen and Jack Benny. They then are asked to emulate the styles and production values of a selected genre by working in production teams. In addition, the students produce mini-radio shows which are broadcast between classes within the school and out to the broader world via the Internet.
Television production classes at Gordon Parks Academy are organized like college production workshops. The class is divided into four levels: Introduction to Television Arts; Television Two; Television Three; and Advanced Workshop. Students progress to each level as they demonstrate proficiency in various skills. Each segment is divided into 10 unitsor chapters . These chapters include topics such as How Television Works, All About Videotapes and Parts of a Video Camera. Vocabulary words are introduced for each unit. Three times a week each class puts into practice the vocabulary and skills they have learned in that unit. The chapter ends with a written and practical assessment.
Within each unit, students are assigned a project to demonstrate their understanding of the synthesis of presented material. I often confer with homeroom teachers to hone in on a literacy or curricular content goal and weave it into the television lesson. For instance, a class that is having difficulty following rules of punctuation and grammar in their creative writing may be assigned a television production project that involves the class first writing individual scripts in which they must demonstrate these skills.
In addition to teaching the six daily television production classes,it is my responsibility to oversee the weekly production of The Gordon Parks Academy weekly television program. The show is thirty minutes long. It is cablecast on Comcast Cablevision TV 26 and reaches almost 300 thousand homes throughout New Jersey.
Each show contains about eight three-minute stories. Due to time constraints, two new stories are added and two are deleted each week. On a traditional linear editing system this would mean editing the entire program from scratch, or dubbing down sections of the show with sections added or deleted.
Of course, using today's non-linear editing techniques, the whole show's raw media and editing timeline reside on the computer's hard drives. This allows the student editors to simply mix and match news segments without affecting the clarity of the surrounding program material.
Speaking of hard drives, with no disrespect to the external fire wire storage drives being marketed, we have experienced the most reliability from keeping video data (and lots of it) on removable ATA drives attached to the computer's motherboard via an array of "hot swap" drive trays. This arrangement allows us to have three 250 gigabyte hard drives online at any one time without making expensive purchases of RAID arrays or daisy chaining drives along the Firewire or USB bus.
A core group of students visits our television production facility each morning before school. They meet with myself and students on the production team to discuss what is happening around the school and what would be of interest to their fellow students.
Once it is decided what stories are to be included in the show that week, the production crew is set up. The concept of teamwork and group ownership of a television project's success is emphasized heavily. The jobs that are assigned are rotated to as many students throughout the school as possible However, students who express a burning desire to perform a certain job such as director, cameraperson, reporter or audio engineer are encouraged to stay with that job for a while until they get ample practice.
On location stories emulate the format of professional television news broadcasts. The pre-production steps include writing the "stand up" script and writing the voiceover "track" before any video is shot.
The adherence to a prescribed format of production serves two functions. First, it gets the students used to the language of news (see "Jargon Decoder"). Secondly, habitual pre-planning prevents over shooting. The truism, "Plan your work and work your plan," means that you only shoot what you need to edit. Since time is tight at Gordon Parks Academy as in the outside news environment, we usually know how something will be used while its being shot.
Back in the "olden days" of 1997, my predecessors had the wisdom to set up the Gordon Parks Academy broadcast center like a "real" television studio. We have a traditional blue and black curtain backdrop. We also have two single chip Panasonic 5000 series studio cameras with intercom and rear-mounted camera controls (zoom and focus). Linking the cameras is a Panasonic switcher and advanced audio mixing system. The students use the traditional set-up as part of their exposure to how television shows are produced. The intercoms can be quite fun to use for a ten-year-old broadcaster.
The harsh reality however is that the clarity of picture and absence of information loss inherent in the new generation cameras we own, such as the Canon ZR 60 make them the equipment of choice for all Gordon Parks Academy productions. So when it comes time to record anchor segments for the news, in-studio interviews or wrap arounds, the studio serves mostly as just another location, and not the technology center it once was. Modern equipment is brought in to get the best quality and meet current technical standards.
Since teleprompters are high budget items, I have developed my own "multiple takes until you get one good one" style of production. For most young performers, it actually looks more natural to work through each segment of on-camera performance until fluency is achieved.
Last summer, I stumbled upon a nifty piece of software, which has helped us achieve that cutting-edge look of commercial television news. Visual Communicator by Serious Magic combines an excellent prompting system with an easy to use chroma-keyer that comes with some amazing virtual sets; all for just five hundred dollars! As your talent reads their on camera lead ins, news segments and video cover shots can be cut in live. The Canon ZR60 camera attaches to the PC running via fire wire and Voila! the students have a television news studio in a box. Well, almost. This software generates beautiful composite images and produces crystal clear graphics and sound but takes quite a while to render and export to tape. Its editing functions are quite limited and work best with pre-edited segments for roll-ins. So guys, don't throw away your NLE's …yet.
The editing room is where a television show really comes together. And Gordon Parks Academy is no exception to this rule. Freshly shot video footage is fed into our Pinnacle Studio 8 software right after its shot and assigned a descriptive name. This is especially important since Mini DV tapes have little room for precise labeling of what shots are contained on each tape. Although arguably a "prosumer" product, Studio 8 is practically given away with the purchase of every Canon Digital Camcorder, its features exceed the needs of most educational television settings. Since we have downloaded the current software upgrades and numerous debugging "fixes", the editing process has become quite enjoyable for students and teachers alike.
The future looks bright for educational television production at Gordon Parks Academy. We are meeting the immediate goal of sending out a broadcast quality weekly news show to educate our community as to what our school is achieving as an educational institution. Our students are learning to produce television, radio and animation! Now that we are emulating the "professional" we must also strive to develop our own techniques in communication-- something the commercial stations may soon want to try out, too. Stay tuned.
Videographer and television production teacher David Balaban may be contacted for further information at THEMUSICMACHINE@aol.com
The following are some of the tools Gordon Parks Academy depends on for its radio and television broadcasting classes.
Hardware:
Software:
Sidebar: This should be placed on the same page as the main article segment entitled "The 'On Location' Big Shoot"
Jargon Decoder
Five "must know" TV production buzzwords.
By Amy Poftak
Every year Technology & Learning magazine honors outstanding educators though our Ed Tech Leader of the Year program. Last year's contest produced several brilliant examples of what can happen when you pair a passionate instructor with powerful digital video tools. Here, we profile the projects of two semifinalists, an AV/Media Coordinator from Illinois and a technology teacher from South Carolina.
While the word "AV" may conjure up images of overhead projectors and cassette players, at Niles West High School in Skokie, Illinois, Joe Brennan's AV Center is tricked out with iMac computers, DV camcorders, and digital media converters. Inside, kids are working on an age-old assignment-the family tree-but instead of writing papers or creating static PowerPoint presentations, they're crafting videos of their own personal immigration stories.
The project, part of a history unit on the great immigration waves of the 1800s, is especially salient in suburban Skokie, which over the past decade has seen a large influx of recent immigrants to America. School officials estimate that more than half the student body speaks a language other than English at home, with Assyrian, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog, and Russian predominating.
"Kids talk to relatives and have conversations they've never had with them before," says Brennan. "They can ask their parents what was it like to grow up in India or to sneak out of Poland. Often they come to a new realization of how hard the first generation works to help the second one get a leg up."
Once students gather the raw material-both full-motion and still images-Brennan helps them whittle it down to a 5-10 minute video. Learning the technology isn't difficult, he says. It's getting story-worthy footage that's the challenge. "Instead of doing a Google search or going to an encyclopedia, students are forced to go to a primary source. The quality of their research is much better as a result."
Going directly to the source is also the focus of Bruce Barber's work at the Berkeley County School District in St. Stephen, South Carolina. Rather than having students read off news items at the start of the day, as many schools with broadcast television programs do, Barber seized on the roving news team concept. Before long, he had trained middle schoolers to build a television studio in any location under ten minutes-replete with low-end portable lighting and a rolling backdrop.
"We like field trips," says Barber when asked about his motivations. "I wanted kids to film and talk to people wherever we went." One of their biggest "gets"-news-speak for snagging a choice interview-was vice president Al Gore, then in office. Already pros at doing on-the-spot news, a team of students made the hour trip to Charleston and set up shop aboard Airforce 2, where the pre-flight interview took place.
In the St. Stephen Middle School, students produce 12-minute television shows every week. There's a student technical director with a staff of ten, and an anchor heading up ten writers and reporters. Over at the high school, Barber's students produce a weekly two-hour cable TV sports show and occasional specials. His basic strategy is to build on his students' personal strengths-the artistic ones polish the video in the editing process, for example, and the loquacious ones get tapped to be reporters-and then have them learn from each other.
Lest you think these are slick city kids, St. Stephen, located in the middle of the Frances Marion forest, is unmistakably rural. Geographical boundaries don't apply here, however. "Our kids are able to hold their own with anyone and think on their feet," says Barber, who points to the writing, listening, and professional communication skills the news program cultivates.
Besides improving student writing and speaking, Barber reports other notable side effects. "We've seen attendance go up. They feel ownership-it's more than just school." Some of St. Stephen's students have gone on to become the first in their family to graduate high school or attend college, achievements Barber attributes to the skills and confidence they gained as members of a first-rate news team.
Amy Poftak is executive editor of Technology & Learning. To find out more about the Ed Tech Leader of the Year program, visit www.techlearning.com/content/contest/etloy. Entry deadline for this year's contest is September 10, 2004.
By Susan McLester
Research tells us the following:
Kids Like "Real"
When students prepare multimedia projects for a real audience, they:
Kids Learn Critical Skills
When students act as multimedia designers in the service of broadcasting video or creating classroom projects, they are learning and using the following skills.
Project Management
Research
Organization and Representation
Presentation
Reflection
"An audience of one-the teacher-is less demanding than an audience of many-particularly one's peers. Students quickly recognize that publishing a multimedia document that communicates effectively requires attention to both the content and the design of the document."
*Excerpt from ISTE report
Sources:
Susan McLester is editor in chief of Digital Media in the Classroom and Technology & Learning.
From Digital Video in the Classroom (techlearning.com/digitalvideo/;jsessionid=YFZVKVBYBGLEUQSNDBCSKHY)
Light Right - A Crash Course In Lighting Video by John Jackman Believe it or not, your productions can look almost as good as network television without buying new cameras.
Cameras in the Classroom by Bruce A. Johnson An overview of DV Cameras and the Accessories that make them go zoom.
Never Too Young by David Warlick Video production plus teachers and kids in the elementary grades equals motivation squared. Read on for some cases in point.
10 Hot Tips: Getting the most out of Final Cut Express by Tom Wolsky A collection of 10 tips and tricks
Meaningful Digital Video for Every Classroom by Hall Davidson A strategic guide to integrating digital video into your lessons.
From DV Magazine (www.dv.com)
Shooting DV For Broadcast by Tim Mangini Surprisingly common mistakes while shooting DV can create problems that are time-consuming and expensive to fix in post. Avoid those problems and make footage that looks great, not just tolerable.
Techniques for Moving Type By Trish Meyer Create modern type animation tricks using the best tool for each job.
The Director in the Classroom All about using video in school settings (http://www.thedirectorintheclassroom.com/indexnew4.php)
Understanding Television Lessons Plan from the Discovery Channel (school.discovery.com/lessonplans/programs/understandingtelevision/)
"An Electronic Voice" A great article on an award winning Video produced by deaf students in California. CUE Magazine February 2002. Proof that students can change their world through filmmaking. www.cue.org/newsletter/feb02.html
The Impact of Media and Technology in Schools: Bertelsman Foundation Report on Multimedia An important research paper, especially relating to the long term benefits of multimedia lead instruction. (Pgs 45-47 are the highlights of the study.) Thomas C. Reeves, Ph.D. The University of Georgia
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