What does your school do with video?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I would like to hear the experiences of others with two related topics. I imagine parents & teachers would be the best sources.

  1. What does your high school and junior/middle school do with video production, if anything? Do the students produce any regular programs (daily, weekly, yearly) and what are they like? News, features, entertainment? Sporting events and concerts? Are they viewed by the entire school? Is video production a curicular class or extra-curicular? Do you feel this has been a success or a waste of time? Are any shows viewed outside the school, like on a local cable access TV channel?

  2. Does your school subscribe to Channel One? If so, what are your experiences with it? How long have you subscribed? What are the positive and negative aspects of the show? If you don’t subscribe, is there a reason why not?

It would be useful if you indicated the size of the school per class (how many students in each grade, for example) for comparision, since larger schools would probably have more resources.

If anyone is not familiar with Channel One, it is a 12-minute daily program produced for the appropriate age groups and includes international news and features. Channel One will supply all equipment, wiring and satellite hookup, including a 19" TV set for each classroom, at no cost. The tradeoff is the viewers have to watch 2 minutes of commercials per day along with the news show.

2

I’m neither a parent or a teacher, but I work in the IT dept. for a K-8 district (around 130 kids per grade)… so I guess that’s good enough.

We have a TV studio in our middle school and a daily morning show. Most of the equipment was donated by a parent that was in the business. The show is pretty much just weather, morning announcements and the pledge, but the kids that are involved in it do a great job and are really into it. It’s a live show and isn’t recorded.

We also have an “exploratory” media production class for 8th graders. It’s a 5-week class that was created for scheduling purposes, but there are some kids that excel at it so I don’t think it’s a waste of time or resources. They write skits, then act it out and tape it, then do the production in Windows Movie Maker.

We don’t use Channel One, but we had it when I was in high school. No one really watched it, I think it was only on before homeroom which was time to socialize and do homework…

3

Thanks, biometricks – that’s exactly the kind of info I was looking for. Now I hope more people will join us and tell us about their school.

4

We had Channel One in Middle School and High School (ca. 1991-98). It was terrible. It merely added 15 minutes of goof-off time to whichever class you happened to have that hour. No one really watched it*, and it seemed like it had as much commercial time as content time, which, as a captive audience, was doubly offensive.

It would have been better for the teacher to read us one news story every morning. Less time, more content.

Fuck Channel One.
*But even if we did: Is this what U.S. kids need? More TV?

5

So no matter what the content is, if it is shown on TV, it’s bad?

I took freshman psychology, history and science courses at college long ago that were on TV for 2 of every 3 class hours. Did I get a bad education?

6

Our high school offers a video production class. I’m pretty sure that an Intro to VidPro is offered at the Freshman campus. Video that meets criteria goes onto the school web page. There is no freaking way we would allow a school-produced program to be channeled into our classrooms. This is not an Administrative decision, it is one made by the teachers. We raised hell until they lengthened 4th period by 5 minutes so they could read the bulletin then rather than disturb class time. Any attempt to take away teaching time would be met with outright hostility, if not armed resistance. Channel One wouldn’t even make it to the preliminary agenda before getting shot down in flames.

Most classrooms are hooked up to the school cable system, so we can request the Media Center to access certain programming when desired. This comes in handy when things like 9/11 happen.

A number of classes offered the option to do a video production to fulfill certain requirements. I do for several units, most notably the “French Revolution Newscast” assignment.

7

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to confuse the medium with the content. You are, of course, right: TV per se isn’t bad.

However, Channel One is very much the same crap that comes over the airwaves: commercials + shallow news + ADD presentation.

How should I know? Did you?

8

I work at a large high school in a fairly large suburban district (building our fourth high school). We have 500 to 700 students per grade level (9th thru 12th) in each high school.

My school has a video production class. One of their responsibilities is recording and broadcasting the daily announcements in a news-style format (but a lot more casual than real TV news). We have televisions in every classroom and it takes about 5 to 10 minutes of 2nd period every day, but extra time is built into the period for this. In my experience, the students generally do pay more attention to these video announcements than they do to intercom annoucements read by the office staff, but that’s not saying much. A lot of kids pretty much ignore it, and I myself sometimes have trouble paying attention when it becomes just a long laundry-list of events and reminders that don’t effect me. It’s easy to miss the things you DO need to hear because there are SO many announcements each time. They really ought to pare it down to just things that are pertinent school-wide.

For a long time it was very routine and boring because they weren’t doing anything more than sitting in front of the camera and reading a list of announcements, but they’ve gotten a lot better in the last year or two with their style of presentation and especially with their technicals skills.

They often include special segments highlighting some of our school’s sports teams or other extracurricular groups, or a quick interview of a teacher, or sometimes specially made commercials for upcoming events. They’ve also helped teachers produce some basic tutorial videos that were aired the week before our big statewide standardized testing.

All in all, I think it is a good thing, but their daily announcements need to be much more brief, with the occcasional special interest story still added on every so often.
Oh, and when I was in high school we had Channel One for my senior year and at first it seemed cool, but we soon began to mock it and then ignore it and talk and goof-off until it was over.

9

OK. I just thought you exhibited an anti-TV bias.

I’m not a great fan of conventional news programs, either (I get more news from the Internet than broadcast TV), but an awful lot of people watch it. The difference between NBC and Channel One is C1 is slanted toward the younger age group. They won’t get that at home.

When I was a kid, we had a Weekly Reader (does that still exist?), which was a non-color print publication tailored towards various age groups (primary grades, older, high school editions). Teachers received a classroom guide with each issue, and I personally feel it was an effective way to teach kids about current events. But print media is very limiting compared with today’s TV – no sound, no motion, no immediacy.

So I suspect presentation in a TV format with hip graphics, etc. is a better way to reach high school kids than, say, a radio program or newspaper. It’s a medium that has many advantages over others.

10

Would that invlidate my other opinions?

A lot of people watch a lot of stupid crap. Therefore we should show it in schools?

What does this mean? That C1 is condescending?

I agree! I remember Weekly Reader!

What about my suggestion about having the teacher read a news atticle and having the class discuss it? I seriously think this would be much better than C1, and it would take less class time. (2 minutes to read, 5-10 minutes of discusssion vs 12 minutes of C1.)

Kids aren’t as stupid as you think. On second thought, maybe I am mistaken. Are you talking about one of those high schools with 30% illiteracy you see in movies like Dangerous Minds or Lean On Me?

Teens generally can tell when they are being condescended towards, and the things which you may perceive as making C1 maarketed towards teens, the teens may perceive as condescention.

I disagree, but whatreyougonnado?

I would like to reiterate that I think the worst part of C1 is that it involves showing commercials to a captive audience. Many of us found it offensive that we were forced to watch commercials in class. Also, I would not have problem with, and would probably encourage, a setup where the students produce their own show.

11

One man’s stupid crap is another’s intelligent education, it seems. I am not proposing the introduction of Three’s Company, more like The History Channel.

I don’t think a news show slanted towards kids is necessarily condescending, but their interests and POV might be different from 60yo adults, don’t you think?

Not a bad idea. How about spending the same 2 minutes watching interviews with a foreign ruler, listening to the sounds and pictures of whales in the ocean, seeing large color pictures of a real-time image of Jupiter, or watching a time-lapse experiment from an expensive laboratory? None of that is possible with a teacher who is limited to non-TV classroom materials.

I am not saying that TV is the answer to all education needs, nor a substitute for a real teacher. It is only one of many resources now available to the educational system and I don’t believe it should be overlooked.

With respect to the college TV classes I took decades ago, they were produced in the university’s studio by teachers on the staff, then shown to students in multiple classrooms simultaneously and repeatedly. This was 2 hours of each 3 hours of classtime; the third hour was a discussion group with a smaller class size and a teaching assistant or prof going one-on-one. The TV class provided a cheap was to distribute a lecture, and the personal touch filled that gap, because if you had any question about the lecture, you could always ask about it in the 3rd hour.

I don’t like commercials, either, but I put up with them in order to avoid paying cash for some services. I think most people can tolerate some ratio of commercials to content; it’s a tradeoff. The trick is to find what ratio is acceptable.

It would be unreasonable to expect public schools to be totally commercial-free. Look out the school window to see advertising. Notebook covers, writing instruments, drink cans, textbook covers, lunchboxes, splashed across computer screens…there’s advertising everywhere, but it seems to be tolerable for the benefits it offers.