Broadcasting with Adobe Visual Communicator
By Tamela Blaszkowski MACUL Grant Recipient
Broadcasting in schools can come in many shapes and forms depending on the age level, the technology available, and the district support. Announcements can be made by a teacher or student through all different configurations of broadcasting: from public address systems, live television broadcasting within the school, uploading to the internet to share with staff and parents, and even through the use of green screens. Broadcasting most definitely involves some form of technology and, a majority of the time, student production.
Producing TV quality broadcasts are ideal for project based learning during a technology class or as a group and has become even easier by using Adobe Visual Communicator 3 as the basis for the project. A MACUL Grant made it possible for our school, Kennedy Middle School, a part of Lake Shore Public Schools in St. Clair Shores, to purchase the package program made available on
SchoolTVMadeEasy.com with the program Adobe Visual Communicator 3. This program helped our broadcast class become familiar with creating announcements and other special video presentations that are exciting to students and staff. The students not only learned to use the Adobe Visual Communicator 3 program, but also learned to use a teleprompter, visual effects, title and music, and much more. The program allows for the appearance of real world television newscasts.
When moving to this type of production where do you begin? The first step is to decide if you will be producing these projects as a class, or as a club or group. It is also necessary to decide
where you will have the announcements. A room that has space for your computer, camera, lights and green screen is preferable. Then decide when and how the broadcast will take place. Will it be live or will it be recorded and played later? Will you be uploading it to a web page? With the Adobe Visual Communicator 3 (VC3) package it is simple to do any of these things and easy for the students to be the creative juice behind it all. The package from
SchoolTBMadeEasy.com includes a camera, VC3, a fire wire, microphone clips, green screen fabric, audio mixer and audio cable, as well as training DVDs. You need a computer, a tripod (helpful, but not required), and some extra lights, which can be done cheaply. You never have to feel alone using this program as the website provides additional training videos along with a Yahoo group that you can participate in to ask questions.
In my current situation I have a class of students that participates in one trimester of Broadcast. The main activity of this class is producing the daily news bulletin live broadcast. They receive software training in VC3, write and enter the script for the day, add visuals to be projected to the green screen at the appropriate times, as well as add title overlays to the announcements that will make the message clear to the viewer. As the students become more advanced in the use of the software, videos are added to the green screen effects and audio tracks are added through the audio mixing board. Students then produce the announcements and upload them to the library website at kmslibrary.weebly. com under the Wake Up Kall tab (our crew’s show name). The next day before production even begins, students watch the announcements from the day before and evaluate themselves using a self-evaluation rubric to determine what they did well and what needs improvement. The self-evaluation rubric is taken one step further with students using the rubric to evaluate real television broadcast news at home. This gives the students an
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