For many years, we aired our morning news program live
through our school’s television distribution system. With the arrival of interactive white boards,
our school district quit supporting the television system, so we needed a new
way to put on the news. After much
experimentation, we have found an easy and inexpensive way to produce and show
our morning news.
We have five student news crews- one for each day of the
week. Each crew has four students – one
to produce the script, one to handle the music, one to run the camera and an
anchor. Often, the students switch jobs,
as circumstances require. We create and
film the show the day before it is aired.
The first step is to write the script. We create a PowerPoint presentation with a
welcome slide with the date, one slide for birthdays, one for the lunch menu,
one for the weather, one with announcements, one for a math or spelling
problem, on for the daily book talk, one for the Pledge of Allegiance, and a
final slide with the morning exercises.
We have installed Mix with our PowerPoint program. Mix allows you to record audio or video or
inking onto a slide. Using the
computer’s web camera and microphone, we record the anchor reading the slides
and writing out the answer to the day’s math or spelling problem. One nice feature of Mix is that you record
only one slide at a time, so that if an error is made, you only have to
re-record one slide. You can add special
effects and transitions as well as web links, documents, photos and more. You
can also have your principal or teachers record a slide if they want to appear
on the show. I do a daily book talk,
featuring one of the titles in the library.
Our physical education teacher does an exercise or dance
routine for each news show. She chooses
students from her PE class to appear on the morning show as a reward for good
behavior. She either exercises or dances
with these students and we record them with a digital video camera. We than upload that video to our school’s You
Tube channel. After uploading, we embed
the You Tube link into a slide on our presentation. This allows the teachers to link to the You
Tube video so their class can participate in the exercise program every
morning.
After we are finished creating the show, we use Mix to
upload it to the Office Mix website.
There are different security settings so that you can limit who can
watch the show and allow comments, if wanted.
Mix then provides you with a link that you can send to your
teachers. I also put that link on our
school’s Facebook page so that the parents can also enjoy our morning
show. We’ve had a lot of positive
community reaction to our morning news show.
The students and staff enjoy watching it every day. The students on the news crew gain valuable
experience in creating and filming a daily show, and they have a good time
working together.
Click the link below to see the show we aired on January 26,
2016.
