"building the capacity of public media and technology organizations"
I'm more or less continuing work on some of the same projects described in my last report. At Brighton High School we are finishing up post-production of the first episode of BHTV, which the TV production class has worked all semester to produce.
Current Projects:
Project: Develop Strategic Plan for HOME, Inc.
Drivers: AJ McGuire, Alan Michel
Result: A strategic foundation that includes well-defined programming, meta-structuring of how all HOME, Inc. related programs converge, detailing of company roles, an updated organizational mission, etc.
Date of Completion: May 2007
First Shot - So this Monday will be my first day doing the bit that urgently matters in a minute-to-minute sort of way: working in one of our after school programs. At the moment we're short of solid information but it looks like my co-worker (also a CTC VISTA) and I will be playing zone with 25 high school freshmen and somewhere between 0-5 video cameras in an effort to provide an interesting hands-on introduction to media production and digital storytelling. We're attempting to do this by breaking things up into small groups with very specific aims (mini-missions) and augmenting the equipment with whatever we can scare up.
Well it's day two and I thought I'd better get around to doing a blog before Danielle comes to Grand Rapids to kick my butt. :D
I've basically been on the job for two weeks already. The Grand Rapids Community Media Center hired me as a contract worker for two weeks so I could get a head start. Get some training in before the school year started so I wouldn't be jumping in cold with students.
I'm working mostly with an organization within the GRCMC called MoLLIE, short for Mobile Learning Lab for Information Education. One of the things we do is go into a few of the Grand Rapids Public Schools and teach students to make short videos based on something they are learning in class. Today we were at a special school here called Zoo School. It's for bright 6th graders and is a small school run at the John Ball Park Zoo.
Comment from Rebecca White on September 13, 2006 - 12:52pm
Good to hear your "first" few days are going well!
Comment from danielle martin on October 2, 2006 - 11:09am
Could you sign out cameras from BNN?
Also, I was meeting with some guys from ACME Boston last night who are trying to do video blogging workshops with folks with no equipment, and we found some resources on the Current.tv site...click on the "Film/Video Resources Near You" link on the bottom (damn Flash menus mean no permalinks to content!). I haven't contacted these folks yet (Project Thnk Different is listed, but I don't think they have any equipment) but it might help.
Oh and I saw this guy speak yesterday, John Herman, at the Boston Media Makers meeting, who is a media literacy teacher up in NH. He said he pitched the idea of doing a student run multimedia newspaper to somebody from Vonage and they sent him cameras and equipment. I'm hoping to go visit his class sometime soon.
-Danielle