The Media Spot

The following PSAs were created by two third grade classes working in small groups which researched, storyboarded and scripted their pieces working with their teachers, Ms. Cutler & Ms. Kirksey, and me. Once the shooting scripts were ready, the teachers recruited some bigwigs from the New York entertainment community (who also happen to be 3rd grade parents at The Anderson School*) to collaborate on the productions. Students directed the productions, made decisions about shooting, collaborated on editing, and in one case filmed a documentary that I edited with them. The products are pretty powerful. Check them out, starting with "The Documentary Group", then see the summary of the process by Ms. Cutler, and production notes from our early discussion of PSAs.

TAOTS is a brand new school in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, that is building an innovative curriculum from scratch, based on the Schoolwide Enrichment Model of education.  Starting with K-1, our focus during their first year will be to help their "digital natives" develop age-appropriate technology skills as they develop the ability to communicate using a variety of media. 

Mr. Tandarich, a 5th Grade teacher at PS 124, in Brooklyn, NY is a comic book lover. I have worked with Mr. T to integrate technology into his curriculum since 2005 -- his preference is normally to work within his literacy curriculum around student reading of classic novels. We've always looked for ways of incorporating Mr. T and his students' familiarity and interest in the comic book genre along with 21st century forms of storytelling, and this year, it came together in 5-501's Classic Production of The Invisible Man!

In June of 2009, 4 teachers at PS 334, The Anderson School (one of my AUSSIE schools) traveled to the Galapagos Islands to cap off the development of a school-wide multi-discipline curriculum-building initiative. To expand the potential value of this trip, we used a variety of technology-based resources including digital video and photos, collaborative online digital presentation software (Voicethread.com), an integrated online curriculum map, and a project blog to create and share re-useable custom resources, and to enable teachers to interact with students from the islands.

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.

Summer 2009 at GSS brought together a fantastic team of educator and youth collaborators for 7 video production workshops emphasizing the core principles of media literacy education. The workshops were broken up into 2 genre study and production sequences: Music Videos, and Movie Trailers, and the entire curriculum was archived on Voicethread.com.

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".

One of three videos produced for The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education, this video demonstrates legal uses of copyrighted materials in the context of a 4th grade media education video production. It also captures the TMS production process in action on a well-integrated media education production project. The video shows a class of Title I 4th grade students search for, analyze and acquire copyrighted images and music, then "repurpose" those works to create unique videos. This production process dislodges the works from their original purpose, and transforms them into the necessary building blocks of a rich critical thinking activity.