The Media Spot

The teachers and students at PS 334, The Anderson School, a gifted-and-talented K-8 school Rhys has been consulting with through AUSSIE since 2008, were presented with a unique opportunity to integrate multiple technologies into an exciting opportunity bridging media literacy, traditional classroom learning, and natural science studies. All grade levels collaborated to create multimedia products that would transform their traditional curriculum and embrace the challenge of creating new learning materials to inform their own understanding of the world, while combining new acquisition and practice of technical literacy skills like video production, web development, Internet-based and collaborative annotation resources, with new literacy skills like researching information on the Internet and composing text-based documents on a computer, as well as traditional and real world competencies, like public speaking, teamwork and community building, and persuasive writing.

For our Spring 2009 session at PS 32 with Good Shepherd Services (GSS) "a social service and youth development agency serving vulnerable NewYork City children and families", we continued our production work with a new groupof kids who brought their own ideas and excitement to the videomakingprocess. Alongside the GSS staff and the students, we scripted,planned, videotaped, and edited a video on the themes of "growth" and"identity" for their of the yearperformance, "Grow Mania".

The PS 124 community decided to take a strong stand against school violence. Following this theme, the 5 production groups in class 5-302 made video news releases (VNRs) exploring violence in their lives and community. Extensive preparation, or "pre-production" work by students created a rich, well executed production process that produced dynamic results, and lots of opportunities for critical media analysis.