Assignment Prepares Broadcasting Teacher to Teach Broadcasting

One would assume a broadcasting teacher would know how to produce a video story.  Not this one!  Almost the entire school year has passed with Broadcast Journalism I on my schedule, but we’ve encountered endless delays in ordering equipment.  In the meantime, I’ve learned very little about video production (and that through my friend Louise, a former broadcasting teacher at a nearby school)—until now.

With no real video camera equipment (see paragraph above), I had to use my trusty Nikon D3100 camera and figure out how to take video with it.  It was perfectly serviceable for a brief video story since it can film in segments up to ten minutes in length.

Sisters in Crime: Palmetto Chapter from Stephen Milligan on Vimeo.

Capturing audio was another matter.  The Nikon’s microphone captures sound, but when I played a few test videos, the sound was rather faint and tinny, so I went to Best Buy one and purchased a small, relatively inexpensive Sony clip-on microphone that would plug directly into the camera just to be on the safe side.  It appears to have done the job, but I wish the cable had been a bit longer to provide some more wiggle room (literally and figuratively).   

Setting up the video shoot taught me the wisdom of keeping multiple options open.  I reached out to a contact person for each of my two ideas, and one didn’t get back to me after almost a week had passed, by which time I had already committed to the other because of the time factor involved.

Upon arriving to set up for the event, I realized I would be filming a meeting, which does not necessarily make for exciting B-roll, but again, time was a factor, and the organization’s leaders had expressed interest in using the final video story on their website, so I felt I should make the best of it.

The filming location wasn’t ideal, but I had no control over it—the organization holds monthly meetings at Grecian Gardens in West Columbia.  The restaurant had just opened, so the clatter of china being stacked can be heard in the background, and the Greek music started up midway through my first interview.  Luckily, the group has a standing reservation in a private room, so at least we were away from the bustle of the main dining room.  This room was rather small, but the expected number of members didn’t show up, so I had room to maneuver but still less that I would have liked, particularly with the tripod.  Despite these obstacles, along with the hardship of watching plates of Greek salad, spanakopita, and baklava passing by while I was working, I persevered.

I conducted the interviews first, and only after everything was said and done (literally and figuratively) did I remember I should have positioned the two interview subjects on opposite sides of the frame for visual variety. 

I have realized through this experience that filming is very different from photography.  Many times I had to resist the urge to turn the camera to get a vertical shot, and I had to take more care with framing the shots because distracting or unwanted elements couldn’t be cropped out as they can be with photos.

The editing stage was pretty straightforward, thanks to the previous training on Audacity—Adobe Premier Elements 14 is similar to the audio-editing program in many respects.  At first, I didn’t see the need for the set-in and set-out points, but they are used to pare down the clip before placing it on the timeline (as opposed to placing the entire clip and then cutting), and fine editing can be done on the timeline as needed.

Now I’m totally prepared to dig in and teach broadcasting this fall.  Wishful thinking!  But I now know more than I did three weeks ago, and I have a better idea of how to start and where to start.  Action!

Know-it-all Makes Startling Educational Discovery

Not to be a know-it-all, but…

That’s a line only a true know-it-all would open with.

Heritage Classroom.  Massie Heritage Center.  Savannah, Georgia.  National Register of 

Historic Places (April 13, 1977).  Photographed by Stephen Milligan (September 26, 
2015).

Not to be a know-it-all, but the first module for the Teaching Multimedia course was pretty much a review for me.  I’ve been advising my school’s newspaper since 2003, so I know it all.

Protecting sources?  Know it.  Maintaining objectivity?  Know it.  Cutline?  Know it.

I thought this was a multimedia course, not an introduction to journalism!  I had visions of immersing myself in technology that would help me help my newspaper students class up our little online paper with interactive elements and slideshows and video—video taken by my Broadcast Journalism I class on our fancy new audio and video equipment (if we can ever cut the purchase order from the confines of district red tape).  And I would be able to use all of these new audio and video editing skills I had hoped to acquire in this course with the broadcasting students, too.  Our first broadcast would be so professional that people at school would think they had mistakenly tuned in to CNN, not WWJK News.       

So far, we’re learning journalism basics.  Easy.  This course must be for journalistic greenhorns, not a know-it-all like me! 

Then I got to Task 4: View these live links.

The very first link took me to a list entitled “Multimedia Tools.”  I was dazed as I examined the list—I’d only heard of a few of these resources (and that few includes Google Maps).  But weren’t these the very same resources I’d hoped to be exposed to during this course?

My smugness at being familiar with basic journalism concepts continued to fade as I delved into “Tutorial: Multimedia Storytelling: Learn the Secrets from Experts,” the next link.  This is where I learned how complex putting together a multimedia story package can be.  Shells and storyboards and fieldwork!  Oh, my!

But the kicker came when I investigated the “Best Online High School Newspapers” link.  What incredible journalism these high school students are engaging in!  The sites showcased here are so professional looking—with movement, photography, Twitter feeds, scrolling updates on sports scores…even live broadcasts.  But isn’t this, too, what I wanted to learn?  The tools and training to help my student staff build a snazzy journalism program—nay, a media empire—are before me in this course, the very course in which I had, only days before, thought I had known it all!

Now, I realize I am just one of the greenhorns.  This course is exactly what I need as a teacher to help my students bring our online newspaper to a higher level of quality, to start this broadcasting program off in an innovative fashion, to entice the introductory journalism students to continue in the program, and to engage our audience with newsworthy content delivered in a fresh, exciting way.

But before that happens, this know-it-all has a lot to learn.

All the News That’s Fit to Broadcast

This has been a pretty good week at school.  Miraculously I have had some time during my planning periods the past few weeks to get the Journalism Work Room and Dark Room (really a storage room since we don’t work with film photography) mostly straightened and cleaned up after months—nay, years—of neglect…including organizing the cabinets and drawers.  Now, as of this week, I have just a couple of drawers and four cabinets to work through before it’s done!  I’m not sure where all of this spare time is coming from, though.  Probably Monday I’ll walk in to an e-mail message reminding me the Japanese translation of War and Peace I should have been working on for the past month is due by 3:15.  Oops!

But that’s not the only good news on the school journalism front.  I also found out one of my best writers from Journalism I, whom I also taught in English I Honors a couple of years ago, will be on next year’s staff.  She skipped a year somehow (probably scheduling), but she’ll be back next year.  And this young lady has already engaged in a partnership with a local media outlet (which I totally forgot to mention in this week’s discussion board question about partnerships).  This past year, she has been an intern with the Columbia Star, a local, independent, weekly newspaper.  I’ll definitely be picking her brain to see if we can take further advantage of the door she’s already opened.

Detail.  Gymnasium wall.  W.J. Keenan High School.  Columbia, South Carolina.  2007.  
Photographed by Stephen Milligan (September 30, 2007).

But wait—there’s more!

Another current journalism student (second year) asked me this week what Journalism III Honors was—she said when she was called in by her counselor to make her schedule for next year, that’s the journalism class she was put into.

And, yes, I am at a school where teachers aren’t given their teaching schedules for the following year much in advance or even have much say in it.  Some years I’ve surmised my schedule based on students telling me they were going to be with me the next year for journalism or English.  But it’s better than it was—the first few years I was there, we received our teaching schedules in the mail along with our welcome-back letters.  In August.  With hardly any time to plan.

But I digress.  And this gets even better.

When I went in to see my principal for my final Goal-Based Evaluation conference for the year, he talked about building up the journalism program.  He pulled out a draft copy of the master schedule and told me there was room for another journalism course, which would being me up to three; in fact, he said I currently have only two English II sections, so this could mean I may…possibly…perhaps…conceivably…perchance have four journalism courses next year.  The most I’ve ever had is three, and that was only one year.

Then the other shoe dropped—he would really like to see a broadcasting component in place.

Beggars can’t be choosers, so I guess I’ll have to take that Kent State broadcasting elective after all.

But imagine what I can do with three or four journalism courses!  Imagine having the time to teach all of the concepts we’ve been learning about and produce the publications!

How exciting!  And how frightening!

Let’s just hope I’m not getting in over my head…