Jeff,

I am a high school English teacher in Wisconsin. I have working to advocate for a Tech Integration position at my school (my superintendent is skeptical at best), and I will be teaching a video production class next year.

Just wondering if I could tap you for ideas, advice, curriculum, or suggestions you may have for me in those two areas.

Thanks in advance for your time.

Jeff,
Thanks for your response. As for video productions:

1) We will have some powerful equipment. I've managed to get our principal to purchase some mid-level 3 ccd Sony cameras. We will be working in the PC platform, probably with Sony Vegas Pro.

2) One reason for the start-up of the class is because we have an under-utilized public access station in our town that I have somehow inherited control of. The greatest part of the deal is that our cable provider broadcasts our public access to towns within a 30+ mile radius of our little town. So, we have quite an opportunity for vast viewership and authentic audiences (as you know, that has both pros and cons to it).

3) The class will be open to 10-12 graders at our high school. It is a year-long course, but we are looking at a traditional 45 minute class period daily. The students taking the course will be expected to work outside of the school day to complete work.

4) We have several goals for the class. Right now we have a "club," if you can call it that, and students have been responsible for taping events and presentations at the school. I imagine we will do SOME of that, but I would like to drop that from the program as an objective.
-I teach journalism at the school and I would like to have one objective to be producing a weekly news show that is a spin-off of our student newspaper. I think I can use my newspaper students to write much of the content for that show, and so one goal is to produce a live "morning" show. There are so many challenges associated with that that it will be a good challenge for the kids. I've ordered much of the equipment I will need for that, and I think we will run a 3 camera set-up with a switching board and a live feed.

-I want students to build their writing and pre-planning skills. This is a class offered in the English department, so I want them to really work on putting together solid script work and story boarding their projects out. If you have any suggestions of software that helps to do this, I would be open to them.

- I want students to be imaginative and to go through the process of creating works that matter to them but that they can learn important real-world skills from. While documentary is the term that comes to mind, I want individual projects for part of the class that they can see to the finish.

- I also want student to have the experience of working with and for a customer. Meeting a customer's exacting standards is far different than meeting your own, and so I'd like them to have those experiences as well.

Hi Jeff,

With your work in Education Technology integration, I recommend you take a look at Wiziq's virtual classroom and authorstream's power point presentation platform. Both are web based platforms, have a bunch of features and free basic service.

Thanks.

I love it. Great ideas there. It is just nice to connect with someone actually doing what I want to be doing. It's tough to find other schools around here with a video program.

So with the non-linear powerpoint, were you thinking about adding in video segments to the game? Not only do you have something interactive, but it features your students movie making skills as well. I love that. And with PowerPoint 2007, I think it is easier than ever to make that an online tool that we could post to our district's home page.

Do you have a place online where you stream the kids work or where we can view student videos from your school?

Hi Jeff. I was wondering if you and your students would be interested in participating in a nationwide SAT Vocab Video Contest @ MIT university. If not, perhaps you have some educator contacts you could direct me to. You can view contest details at BrainyFlix.com Please let me know. Thanks!

Well, it took some convincing for me, but I was able to get a local group to invest in a digital server from the Princeton Server Group (now owned by Telvue). That works well for our situation because our analog equipment for broadcasting on the public access station was really slowing us down. Now we've got over 1 TB of storage space that can play directly to the station, or that can just store files. The server has swappable hard drives, so that offers even more storage space. Outside of that, I'm planning on having to buy some external hard drives for project archiving, but with the price dropping as much as they have, shouldn't be too much of an issue.