Graduating Classes celebrate & reflect!
Student video amplify special projects
Staff-Student podcasts dig into school themes
To help students and staff reflect on, and amplify how the school vision at The Academy of Talented Scholars (TAOTS) is alive in their classrooms and school culture, The Media Spot has facilitated School Vision Productions with them over the past 13 years.
The collaborative media making experience activates the TAOTS community’s media literacy as they decide how to best capture evidence of, and articulate how the core principals of Founding Principal Josephine Sportella-Guisto’s school vision are alive and emerging each year.
2022 Highlight: Podcast Publishing
Audio recordings that amplify initiatives, celebrations & student voice to the community
The OPEN UP TAOTS! Podcast was a new addition in 2022. Assistant Principals, Stacy Butsikares and Theresa Tisdall, as well as the Social Emotional Learning team, and Student Government coordinators all separately collaborated with students to record podcasts that captured the student perspective on issues of the times, live events and learning experiences.
Life at recess, No Place for Hate initiatives, diversity in classroom libraries, and a timely debate about mask mandates (above) were all recorded, and published on Spotify and TAOTS.org for the community. The result is an authentic audio time capsule of life at TAOTS in 2022.
The podcast year ended with the Adventures in Podcasting Enrichment Cluster, in which students took a deep dive into podcast production — engineering their own shows and episodes using soundtrap.com. Small groups created shows according to their interests — recording, editing, cross-promoting each other’s shows, and publishing to the school website and Spotify.
The Media Spot 