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| Tuesday, February 9, 2010 |
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Lights, camera, action!
Published August 24, 2009
Wednesday morning at Scottsboro High School, while some students were reading and others were writing, the school’s journalism class was getting ready to put out the day’s news.
A new video production program at the school has allowed the students to record the announcements to be played for the entire school.
The journalism students have been recording the announcement videos daily since school began nearly three weeks ago.
Jennifer Sanders, media specialist at Scottsboro High School, said the video production program actually started last year.
Sanders said students from Holly Michaels’ journalism class take the announcements—which are submitted via e-mail by teachers and administrators—edit them and get them ready for broadcast.
Sophomore Jake Pittman, who was anchoring segments for this week’s news Wednesday morning, said the journalism students usually just type up the announcements, but also try to condense them by pulling out the most important details.
Michaels said the journalism class is made up of 12 students, who will rotate anchoring the newscast.
“I don’t assign them to do it ... but the longer we’re doing it, the more they’ll want to do it,” Michaels said of how the students are chosen to anchor.
Usually by about 10 a.m., the students are getting ready to record.
Inside the the recording room, a piece of green fabric hangs behind the desk to mimick a green screen, but the background allows Sanders to imput other backgrounds—like the school’s facade or a spinning globe, behind the anchors.
A Dell computer monitor serves as a teleprompter.
Sanders said the anchors do “dry run” through the broadcast before she hits the “record” button.
Though each broadcast is only approximately 3 minutes long, Sanders said the whole process can take between an hour and an hour and a half to complete.
“It’ll take them about 30 minutes and then about 30 minutes to edit,” she said.
Using a Mac computer and Final Cut Express software, she deletes the previous day’s video and drags the newest production into the software application and writes the video.
“Then, one you write it, you go on SchoolTube and upload it,” Sanders said.
SchoolTube is a Web site for student video and media sharing both classroom and entertainment purposes. Michaels said the SchoolTube site is monitored, so takes a while for the video to upload because its being screened.
“You can always rest assured it will be rated G or E,” Michaels said.
After the video is uploaded on the site, the video is posted on the school’s home page.
Sanders said usually finished by around 10:30 a.m. and the video is posted in time for third block, when the broadcast is aired schoolwide.
The public can access the announcement videos by visiting the Web site shs.scottsboroschools.net and clicking on “SCT News.” Sanders said the video works with most browsers, so parents and students can access the announcements from home.
Now the production program is still small, but both Sanders and Michaels said they have plans to use video for other projects—not just for creating daily announcement videos.
Sanders said some videos have been created for special projects, like two students making a “Safety Video” for their chemistry class last year or another student using the production capabilities to create a campaign video for the democracy class’ mock elections. Michaels said they have long term goals of incorporating the video with the school’s newspaper.
She said they’re trying to do what they can with the lack of lighting and all the software they need.
“It wouldn’t take a lot of money, but we don’t have it,” Michaels said.
Sanders said she plans to have two students participating in a video production class next semester. Those student would be editing the videos and posting them online, she said.
Though the production class would be small at first, Sanders said it wouldn’t always be.
“Hopefully, it’ll get bigger and better as it goes on,” Sanders said.
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