Planning Your Campus TV Station

More schools are finding the value of student-run TV stations. This can be as simple as a "One Take" videotaped news segment played every two weeks or a daily show made up of series of shots that are edited together with text, graphics, and sound effects.  Some schools have found success having several teams prepare news tapes so that each team rotates the production schedule. A rotating schedule allows downtime between recordings so that one team can create their show while other teams are focusing on preparing for their next show.

Student writers get much practice writing to their audience, learning to be successful in cooperative tasks, scheduling time, and with public speaking. Diving tasks evenly into their teams, some students will learn camera operation while others learn script writing, public speaking, or computer editing skills.

Feel free to use the comment section below to share your experiences with video productions/ campus TV stations on your campus. We can all learn from our collective experiences!

Attached here is a document created by Beth Weeks, a Discovery Educator and Technology Specialist at Sherman ISD.  She has presented her “Quiet On The Scene” program at TCEA and shares some ideas that helped make their program a success.   Quiet on the Set.doc

Some ideas I learned from Beth's presentation: Their 'film editor' used iMovie to edit together the video. With practice, this job was down to 20 minutes of editing for each show.  The Editor's job was to assign or oversee the writing of national, state, or local news and weather, check for overlap in new stories, check grammar in the news copy, and political correctness. The cameraperson decides how close to shoot and what is seen in the picture.  The news writers worked in pairs to research and write their stories. Set designers were used to setup and take down the set for each shoot and provide a pleasing look for the camera.  Stories were assigned early in the week with due dates set for Friday. All filming was done of Friday and shown the following Monday.  They found that creating a video clip of the news credits was very helpful since it could be reused each time without the time spent on recreating it.