My Response To http://tinyurl.com/3rcnvy6

1. 
   Jared Nichol
   on Sep 25th, 2011
   @ 11:25 am:

   Your comment is awaiting moderation.

   While I do understand that principals are under enormous pressures from many different angles it seems to me that your frustrations about Facebook are from primarily negative experiences.

   Students who use Facebook to bully and harass others should be dealt with strongly and that is covered in your discipline policy somewhere at the school or district level. Or even the police if needed.

   No doubt students and parents misuse Facebook in ways to slam teachers and schools on a regular basis. Is this any different than the coffee crowd getting together to complain? The coffee crowd is now on Facebook. Let’s meet them online instead of hearing the gossip at PTA meetings and in the stands at basketball games.

   If you were my principal I’d want you to embrace Facebook as means of positively promoting the school with our own school page, and working with teachers to reach students with their own class pages.

   Fscebook is where students and parents are. If you model appropriate use of it from the school it sends a message to all in your community. Get parents to post comments on the wall about he awesome things they think about your school.

   It seems a shame to dismiss Facebook like this.

The 'Formative' Newsroom

First post of the year. Welcome back y'all.

There are some major changes in store for RTV. First and foremost I got my proverbial crap together and purged all my old useless resources that I had and changed my classroom into a meaner, cleaner, news making machine!

But now to the good stuff. Once again, I'm turning my class upside down and starting from scratch with a totally different approach. I HOPE that with the help of my tweeps and my assessment gurus on call that I can help my students to the next level. What is that level? I hope a group of students that are more purposeful and reflective about their work.

Here's the plan.

Where do I Start? I'm new!

Students in RTV Broadcasting will be in one of three levels. These are based on the Alberta Education CTS modules at 1000, 2000 or 3000 levels. Newbs come in doing the lower modules and work their way up.

Two Teams

Students have been placed into two teams. Team Black and Team Gold. It's actually Team Black vs. Team Gold. I would like to have a little friendly rivalry to push effort and help motivate them a bit. Maybe vote off a students at the end of each week like Hell's Kitche

n (kidding). There is a good mix of 1000, 2000 and 3000 level students on each team. (10, 20, 30 in my class).

Are you ready for a Challenge?

On our class wiki each week, students will be given a challenge. These challenges are related to a job in the newsroom and linked from the curriculum. Students will have to work with their team to get the news done as well as complete the challenge at their level. The teams will be given a challenge for the week with instructions for what I'm looking for in the newscasts. We aren't going to be good at the beginning, but we will be constantly working to

be better.

Where do we get the time?

Here's what is new for me. Last year was a crazy pace for our news team. It was time to switch it up. Instead of rushing to get things done daily, each team will only do two newscasts a week. We flipped to see who was going to go first. Team Black starts tomorrow. I have done this to allow teams to have a full day in between to prepare graphics, stories, do editing, promotions, and anything else I throw at them.

When do we get the time to stop and THINK?!

I didn't give students the number one thing they were asking for and that was TIME. So, I'm going to give it to them, but they need to be accountable for this time. Several thing will happen with this time, and most of it is on me. I will sit down with the team after each newscast and give them time to talk about how their efforts ahead of the newscast and during the newscasts contributed to the quality of product we saw broadcast that day. This is where I can give my feedback and talk to individuals about changes they need and to see how their stories and newscast will change for the next day. They will then get the rest of the day to prepare in their team.

The Director will watch me run the first post-mortem of the week and it will be his or her job to run the second one with me present. By the end of the first month I hope that I will only be a fly on the wall in that post-mortem meeting, with small additions to help refocus on the challenges and outcomes.

Reflection Fridays. Putting it all Together.

I've pulled newscasts from Fridays. We have many Fridays off in our district as it is, and I want students to have a showcase of their learning from the beginning of the semester to the end. That's why on Friday they will blog and have lots of ammo to show evidence of their learning.

Here's an example of a beginner level students challenge for the week. I will be showing them about "streeter interviews" and they will pair up with 20-level students to complete a news package. Their challenge is to create the lower third identifiers and tell me why they have

chosen effective fonts and contrasting graphics:

Assignment 2- Our First Week of Broadcasts

Due: Sept 9 by the end of class

Team Challenge: Add lower third text to news broadcast and packages

Outcome: describe the impact of each element on the visual message; e.g., line, shape (2D) or form (3D),

colour, texture, depth (perspective), light, direction (motion), mass (visual weight), tone (black

and white) or value (colour), space (positive and negative)

Outcome: Discuss the use of the elements and principles of design in purposeful text creation; e.g., attention-getting text versus readable text.

1. Read up on what the priniciples and elements of design are here.

2. Read up on font terms. What type of font did your team choose and why?

(capline, topline, midline, baseline, beardline, serif, san serif, ascender, descender, bowl, counter)

3. Comment on the font choice that your team has made. What characteristics of your font choice make it appealing for the news? Use font terminology to explain. How is readability of your text? What other font could you choose? Share it in your post.

3. How can you take what you learned about the priniciples and elements of design and apply them to the text and lower thirds on the news? Give an example of your Team's Text Graphics from this week (photo, video) Embed it into your blog. Evaluate your team's graphics. What needs to improve?

4. How was your first team debrief? What are your team's strengths that you will be building upon for next week?

5. What are you wanting to do to improve personally next week?

6. Share the resources you have found with us in your blog post at the end of the post. Embed the links in text. (I'll show you how).

More contacts, more feedback.

I'm excited will have so many chances to give feedback to students. From their individual packages, to team challenges, to post-portems, to helping one on one with setup/teardown, I hope students will really be thinking about their work each day as a way to meet the challenge and the outcomes. I'll probably need some advice about their weekly blogs so they don't get too repetitive in nature and so their summative reflections remain purposeful and deliberate.

Also another thought for my next post: What if my students can demonstrate that they have achieved or exceeded the outcome through their daily work and reflections? What does an 84% reporter look like? Why is there a mark needed if the student communicates effectively that they know what they know? What happens if a student "doesn't demonstrate" an outcome in the first unit, but does in our second? Shouldn't their mark change for the first?

Your thoughts on the two team idea? Days dedicated in the week for preparation and reflection for the teams?

"And We're Clear": RTV Finishes Year 1

It's reflection time with lots of questions to ask myself and hopefully find answers before the next school year. A few people want to know the nitty gritty of the daily operations of our newscast, so here it is.

Our daily newscast to our student body has come along way. We've had some pretty awesome opportunities to work with industry professionals, and do the buzzword stuff that people call 'real world' learning. Heck, a student even got to interview the Premier of Alberta a few weeks ago!

I've still got tons to learn myself. Next year we are making our first foray into HD video with DSLR's for reporting and shooting. That in itself is a huge logistical challenge for editing on machines that are slowing down.

So this post is going to concentrate on what went well and how we accomplished it. I'll save the hard thoughts for next time.

Here's a break down of a typical news day:

8:42- Bell goes and students come in. I have a daily "run down" of the day's newscast of the board. We have a quick production meeting to add the anchors and find out what packages are going to air.

8:50

- Stage crew and camera operators set up cameras and connect them to our Tricaster. This is a must have for production in a box solution and the education price is dynamite!

- Students not in the studio crew are working on their news stories (a camera operator and reporter). They need to submit a story pitch sheet to me before they go out and film.

- Graphics operator works with the weather person to generate the weather graphics

- 2 script writers take the school announcements from a Google Doc that is editable by teachers and start generating the script.

- Anchors work on their own stories or special projects for our district show as needed.

- Director and technical director (tricaster operator) work to connect the cameras and make adjustments to the video feeds as needs, work on getting graphics for the lower thirds, etc.

9:10- Weather is on. We've done weather in front of the green screen and also in front of our large printed mural backdrop. This mural cost around $2000 but it was well worth it. It looks great and if I ever get kicked out of the theatre at our school due to scheduling conflicts, I can mount it on any wall. It's huge at 20' x 10' tall!

- Weather is prerecorded with the current temp (within 1 hour) and a three day forecast. When people watch our news it looks like they send it to the weather person, but it's already in the Tricaster's DDR (digital disk recorder).

Note: The DDR contains our theme songs, finished packages, jpeg graphics, and a lot of other files that need to be played in a newscast.

9:20- Director calls for the script. The script writers print 4 copies to be distributed to the director, technical director, myself and the anchors to do a read through.

- The technical director takes the graphics generated for that day in photoshop and puts them into the tricaster's graphics. We use a simple lower third with a

- Studio Lights and sound for mics are checked by the sound operator

9:30- Anchors are called to the studio

- Script writers become teleprompter operators with the program Prompt Dog

- Audio check for mics and first couple read throughs happen

9:45- final checks on mics and cameras

- Director calls for "quiet on the set"

- The newscast begins!

Here's a sample.

We usually have 3 takes to get it right. The students get immediate feedback for things like audio levels, mics not working, spelling errors or continuity and errors with cameras.

10:00- Tear down by the studio crew

10:09- Our teacher advisory bell goes and we start a 4 minute countdown for students to get settled. The news is streamed via Ustream for now. We hope to do internal streaming for next year.

10:20- The sound booth is closed and we are done for another day!

Students who are reporters and anchors are supposed to do a news story per week. Does that always happen? Usually not. For next year they will be asked to do 1 every two weeks, but they will have to be more in depth, or do two quick streeter style stories in that time.

That's a day at RTV. Next post is going to be what we will be changing for next year. I have a survey of the students for them to provide feedback on what worked and what sucked. A lot of the feedback I will get will talk about the distribution of labour among the class. A few are doing a lot more than the rest. This is something I'll need to change for sure.

See you next time!