Digital Arts Service Corps - summer

Piece by piece

Elizabeth Goussetis — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:38:29 +0000

The Youth Channel is online! Or rather, evidence of the Youth Channel’s existence is online. But that’s pretty exciting. It's one of the small but encouraging pieces that seem to be coming together with the Youth Channel.

We just revamped the Media Bridges website, and the new one is clean and easy to use. The old one looked like it was from 1994, and there was no mention of the Youth Channel. On our new site, I created a page of info about the youth channel and posted our meetings on the Web site calendar. In the next few weeks I’m hoping to set up a blog feature on the Web site so we can add updates about the Youth Channel and announce current projects and ways kids can get involved. Also, we have a Twitter account! We’ll see how that goes. You can follow us; our name is CincyYouthTV.

Currently airing on our Youth Channel time slot are several youth-produced videos from the Mobile Film School in Austin, Texas. Thanks, Amy! If anyone else has youth-produced videos they wouldn't mind having on TV in Cincinnati, please send them my way.

We have several shows in production. Whether this is my doing, or just happened without my help, or a combination, I don’t know. An adult producer here is working with kids from a performing arts high school on an entertainment show, one of our interns is putting together a youth talk show, and a middle school club is planning a regular talk show about manners (yes, manners). I also have a high school student finishing a documentary project, and I am working on a documentary with students at a local elementary school.

I am also having an opportunity every week for kids to come to orientation for the Youth Channel. The goal is to get kids in the door and show them how they can get involved at Media Bridges. I’m hoping that this will help get more youth involved at Media Bridges, hopefully some who can be peer leaders in the future.

We are starting to talk about plans for our summer camp program, which we do every year, but the funding situation is kind of up in the air, so we can’t plan too much. The program we’re hoping to do will be pretty awesome, and I’m excited about it.

Dropping off the face of the vista-planet

Julie Bohnlein — Mon, 14 May 2007 04:45:41 +0000

It's recently come to my attention that I have disappeared from the face of the vista planet. So I have a small update.

Since March, this is what I have been doing at BNN:

- Taking inventory on new equipment

- Going and presenting our summer teen program at summer opprotunities fairs

- Learning how to use the new equipment

- Editing a BNN program called "Early Works" which is a compliation show of footage from recently trained producers

- Helping set up logistics for our summer program (how many teens, how many groups, how many supervisors)

- Mailing out applications

- Recieving applications back

- Setting up and updating spreadsheets on everyone we sent applications to and ones we've recieved back

- Updating BNN's Community Bulletin Board

- Helping with various mailouts BNN has because I'm apparently a mailout-machiiiiiiine.

Instead of being at the Multimedia center in Roxbury everyday, I'm now there four days a week, and spend one day a week at the cityplace location, mainly for updating the community bulletin board and collecting applications.

Lessons Learned: Summer Youth Tech Program at C4K

Raymond Varona — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 18:48:39 +0000

[From the blog of Raymond Varona, August 23, 2006.]

Raymond Varona

During the summer, most of our population was made up of kids whose primary language wasn't English and who had never used a computer before. As a result, the workshops were more like guided activities instead of real skill-building sessions since I have to literally show them, step-by-step, how to do every action (including opening files and browsing through folders). So I started off with an intro to Photoshop and gradually worked my content down to the point where my last workshop was on how to change fonts in different programs...

This brings up a significant problem for Computers 4 Kids in that we have some kids that are learning how to program and others that are learning how to use a mouse, and somehow our programs and curricula have to include both. Definitely something I'll continue to address as the year presses on.

Read more from Ray's new CTC VISTA blog.