Pickens Middle School
Empowering students to create videos
Daily broadcasts connect school community
Blaine T. Peltier, teacher at Pickens Middle School in South Carolina, says Visual Communicator® software was the perfect solution to add video to the classroom because of its ease-of-use, low cost, and versatility. Soon after acquiring the software, the school's eighth grade students began creating Sparks TV, a daily news report that is broadcast into every classroom and faculty office on campus and then posted to the school's website for parents and the community.
Peltier, who provides student guidance for Sparks TV, says students participate in all facets of the production. One student can type the script for the news report into the Visual Communicator teleprompter, while another obtains all the graphics that will be used in the video. Students also take turns creating titles and serving as the director, who ultimately decides which graphics will be used and where they will appear in the newscast.
"Ease of use is probably Visual Communicator's greatest strength," says Peltier. "It's particularly very easy to add the graphics and effects into your video and move them around so that they appear in the right place. In fact, it's easy enough for elementary students to figure our rather quickly."
Publishing made easy
Broadcasting the video across the campus is just as easy. The students simply burn the newscast onto a DVD, and then play it back through a standard DVD player that's hooked up to the school's closed-circuit system. They also save the newscast out of Visual Communicator in an Internet-ready format so it can easily be posted to the Pickens School website.
Before finding Visual Communicator, Peltier says they experimented with primitive broadcasts in which students were recorded in front of a basic curtain backdrop and had to read cue cards made from PowerPoint slides because they didn't have a teleprompter. Peltier says there were also no graphics or broadcast-quality production values. "To give our students the right tools to create broadcasts with real production value, we originally thought we'd have to spend somewhere around US$20,000 for a dedicated video system. The fact that Visual Communicator can produce the same visual quality as a dedicated studio production for a few hundred bucks is just amazing."
An instant success
Peltier says Sparks TV has been an instant success and they are now looking forward to creating student video presentations for a number of projects, such as video book reports, video yearbooks, and photo essays. "The students are having a great time with Visual Communicator — they think it's really cool," concluded Peltier.
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