Creating a Virtual Newscast with South High School
While moving curriculum online addresses student learning outcomes, maintaining morale is just as important. Coming to school gives students a chance to be social, explore new ideas in conversation, and fosters a sense of community among peers. Now online, having only a screen to interact with all day threatens that community. South High School in Bakersfield, California didn’t want to take that chance.
South High School closed on March 17, and within a week, the students begged for a solution to keep the newscast going. “That’s up to you guys,” Video Production Director Antonio Garcia said. Using Zoom and video editing software, South High School’s news team has been keeping their community in the loop since the closure.
We spoke with Antonio Garcia to learn more about how he took his school’s newscast online.
Tell us about your video production class.
I have been teaching at my school for about seven years now. The class itself actually started out as an after school club. Once we gained some interest in doing the stuff that we did, we did a weekly announcement that myself and a few kids would do after school on Friday. It gained some popularity within the student body, the administration saw the potential that it had, so they went ahead and offered a few classes. I was teaching three classes at a time, and then more kids got interested. We grew the program to where it is at now. We have been doing a weekly news show. We have a dedicated studio that we do our show out of. It is primarily student driven. If there is an issue, I can try and help them troubleshoot it, but for the most part, the students do what they need to do. We have won a couple of awards, so we are doing pretty good.
What was the catalyst for keeping your newscast alive?
The students felt it was kind of sad that they were not here. “How can we keep this going? How do we keep up the momentum of keeping people up to date with all the information?” That is up to the students. You can’t get together to flesh out ideas, but online, we can see what kind of opportunities there are. At first, we were thinking of doing the newscast via just a cell phone video camera. Then, the popularity of Zoom came, and that alleviates some of our issues of having to cut and paste, so we went with that.
What does your workflow look like?
The kids will get their script ready at the beginning of the week. We will go through stuff on Instagram to see what is going on. What are the kids talking about? What is your life like in quarantine? We will throw out all the information to the student body to see what kind of stuff they want to talk about. They will get those responses back and get it back into some sort of script form.
My main two students will go ahead and film with either Zoom or their own camera phones. They will put all that together and all the pieces that they need with graphics and music. Luckily, they still have access to all of that via Google Classroom.
They use whatever editing tool that they have that they are more comfortable with. We use Adobe Premiere Pro at our school, but I use Kinemaster when I am doing small things. They have used Kinemaster and Wevideo, but the show that came out today was basically all done on Zoom. It kind of alleviated a lot of the back and forth. It was just putting that stuff in the timeline and getting the graphics that we needed which they did with Adobe Premiere Pro.
Where are you posting videos?
We are posting them on a dedicated news page. The principal and administration are also putting it up on the main school website in a little widget so people can get some information. The more places we can get it, the better it is for us.
What kind of stories are you covering now that school and sports aren't happening and graduation isn’t going to have a big ceremony?
We have a backlog of stories that for whatever reason didn’t make it to air. This week, we had track and field interviews with a couple of the runners and distance sprinter. We call it a double rewind so we can go back and show things that didn’t make it to air the first time. Also, we are showing information like food pick-up days, wifi, and bus pickup routes.
Why is it so important to keep your newscast going?
For all of us, this is uncharted territory. I teach video production but I also teach theatre. The kids are devastated. We were supposed to have a show coming up a week after the return to school date. We were supposed to have awards and all the normal senior stuff like graduation and prom. Instead of having the kids at home and depressed, we figured why not try and bring some cheer. We try to talk about the stuff that is going on. We try not to mention any of the COVID stuff. We kind of keep it on an informational basis. We don’t play up the horribleness that that is going on in the world right now. Our job is to keep the kids connected.
We are on the lower edge of the socioeconomic table. Some kids don’t have the internet, they don’t have the availability of tablets or computers. We can get information out. We can give them a little pep talk. A lot of times, we are their family. A lot of times, they are [at school] from 7am - 8pm. So they see us more than their real family. But we can bring them a little bit of hope during this time. It’s just one of those things; it’s life. Life gets in the way sometimes. We push through. We are stronger.