Floresville Middle School
Middle school announcement videos
Discovering video
Floresville Middle School, located in Floresville, Texas, regularly uses Visual Communicator for school video projects and announcements. John Hineman, a teacher at Floresville, inadvertently discovered Visual Communicator® software at an annual educators meeting. Hineman explains, "I wasn't really looking for software like this, but I was totally awestruck with it during the floor demonstration. I immediately began getting ideas for how I could use it in class and for training purposes."
Each year Hineman works with at least two classes of eighth grade students making projects with Visual Communicator. The projects are seen by the entire student body of 830, as well as placed on the school website. In addition to his classes, Hineman also oversees access for any student who wants to create an announcement video for their club or produce a school-related video report. Many of Hineman's students will come in during lunch and after school to work on a presentation.
School projects
Since purchasing Visual Communicator, Hineman has overseen a plethora of video projects made by teachers, administrators, and students. He explains one of the more creative projects: "The most famous clip we did was from our history department. In the grand tradition of 'Rocky' they found a picture of a messy kitchen to use as a background, cracked open some raw eggs, and drank them down. The next background had the steps of First Union Station in Philadelphia (where the Rocky statue is located). The coaches came running into the frame to give the appearance they were really there in Philadelphia." Another way Floresville uses video is having the school principal or assistant principals make video announcements. Reading from the teleprompter script makes frequent video announcement creation effortless.
Hineman explains about the first day he received Visual Communicator, "I played around with the different pre-loaded shows, and I was instantly hooked. That afternoon, we did our first test with it in class, and the kids all went wild with ideas on how to use it." Integrating Visual Communicator into the classroom has had unexpected benefits according to Hineman, "Visual Communicator makes my life as a teacher much easier because the program forces my students to do preproduction work. Before we would begin a student-led production, it would be mass chaos. Now, my students are writing scripts (and as such, increasing their writing skills for language arts), and, most importantly, they are planning and working with each other."
Future video projects
Hineman plans to continue to use Visual Communicator for future Floresville school projects. "Since Visual Communicator can save the files in different formats, I have wanted to do a fund-raiser at school. I would like to have a choice of virtual sets the students could choose from and then have them record a message. We would save the messages and either burn them to a CD or even better, send them out as an e-mail." The flexibility and functionality of Visual Communicator allow for a wide range of video projects. Hineman adds, "This program allows anyone to be as creative as they want to be."
