The Media Spot

Mr. Destefano, a friend and consulting educator for TMS, is at it again with his high school class in Littleton, Colorado: the 2008 Tech Turn-off.

Each year Mr. D asks his class to forgo TV, movies, text messaging, email and other communication technologies for a week, and journal their experiences on their class blog. The class always generates thoughtful discussion of the role these technologies play: the ways they help and hinder us; the ways they interconnect and isolate us; the effect they have on our physical, social, and emotional landscape.

The Media Spot has worked within The Generation Connection summer camp for senior citizen mentors and kids age 8-12 since it's establishment in 2002. Each day, small groups of campers video tape activities and work with TMS to edit their footage into "Clips of the Day". This year's clips focus on in-camera editing, and employed a 14 year-old counselor in training to assemble and pre-edit camper's raw video clips.

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.

Using the same source video footage, the students created 6 different videos on themes ranging from the difference between organic and conventional farming, buying local vs. food flown in from all over the world, and how the food we produce and distribute effects our environment.

5th grade students in their art class at PS 124 incorporated original pastel drawings in a video, learned about stop motion animation, blue screens, and image mapping in this dynamic collaborative production.

Over a 6-day contract with 130 in the Windsor Terrace neighborhood in Brooklyn we set up a free WordPress.com blog, developed and modeled classroom publishing projects for students, got them posting weekly announcements from the office, and helped the staff start to conquer their fear of school technology!

Fourth graders take a theme-based group writing project on friendship, turn it into a video script, and produce video illustrations to share what they've learned.

A high school English teacher at Heritage High in Colorado ran his annual TV Turnoff on a Wordpress-powered blog through consulting with TMS. The TV Turnoff is part of a media studies unit that Mr. D has incorporated into his high school English class for a few years now, but this was the first time that the students' experiences were documented online.

Class 5-302 at PS 124 generated original "list poems" based on a Walt Whitman poem, and adapted them into videos using their class blogs, creative commons, and iMovie.

Students at PS124 add short "video illustrations" to strengthen ideas in their writing within blog posts.