The Media Spot

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.

• See how they released the video on the PS 124 fifth grade blog
  

The Process

5 production units in 5-302 developed questions based on their main ideas. Students conducted video interviews with PS 124 staff, and visiting lecturers. Julian Marsano, 5th grade teacher and documentary buff, has worked with TMS over the past 3 years to make a variety of videos with his students. He encouraged an air of professionalism among his students during this production that I believe increased their engagement during the writing and overall planning process. Student discussions when determining which theme their production units would cover, what they would say, and who their target audience would be helped them generate clear messages in their scripts, and present video essays focused on well-expressed main ideas.

TMS developed the Video News Release (VNR) Script Organizer with Julian, which gave the students clear guidelines for scripting the video, and put boundaries on the number of video clips they needed to gather for each of their 5 production units which was key to keeping production time feasible when we got to the video editing process. Students also watched examples of other Video News Releases to get a sense of the pace of this type of video.

The project was a culminating activity that brought together inquiry-based research, group discussions and debate, news-authoring for a target audience, script writing, script adaptation, video taping, complex digital video editing, Internet research and downloading, and group project management. The result is a set of videos that gives insight into how these students feel about violence in their lives.