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Whole Story
In February, I finished a unit on Asian literature with my 12th graders. I teach humanities and composition for 12th graders. And we had talked about how the literature was really focused on teaching people how to live their lives. And so I wanted a way for the kids to think about ways that people influence them in today's society. And so I got on the web and found a website that had examples of public service announcements that different groups had created, like drugs and tobacco. And I downloaded them into one file and put them on the TV, and we showed them and talked about the characteristics. So the kids came up with a list of characteristics that was pretty true with every type of public service announcement, things that you might see in a public service announcement. Then after we watched them, I also gave a lecture about persuasive techniques: how you could persuade other people to believe what you wanted them to believe. And then I had them, individually, list three issues that they thought that they'd like to make a public service announcement about. And then I collected all those and put them in groups accordingly.
So in this particular project they didn't get to choose their groups, which they weren't very happy about but I found that the kids that normally didn't complete an assignment did complete this assignment and did work because they weren't with their friends. They were with somebody who expected them to do the work.
So we came to the library, and they researched their topic and most common topics were drugs, or in my classes where I have a lot of kids I had them choose a specific drug. So in my first hour, one group did cocaine, one group did ecstasy, a group did marijuana. We had groups do drunk driving. We had some groups kind of choose some alternative ideas. We had one group do a public service announcement about self-respect. I had one group of girls do a public service announcement about women and self-respect. It was focused on that, all these really horrible things happen to women, and they flashed all these statistics about women like one in four women is raped, and at the end they chose a wide variety of women to be in...everything from a baby to a woman who works in the attendance office, probably in her 60's...and those people all kind of talked about their story, so that was kind of neat. We had one on school violence. So each class, I had four classes, and each class had anywhere from five to seven public service announcements.
So we came to the library, we did the research. Each student was responsible for finding two sources and taking notes. And they were responsible, as a group, for turning in a bibliography at the end. And then I had them do a focus sheet, and I had them choose one focus that they want to prevent a behavior, did they want to create a new behavior, or did they want to have someone modify a behavior. And so they chose their focus, and then they went through all their research and picked out three to five quotes and that kind of varied depending on what they had in mind, but three to five quotes that they thought would be effective in getting across their message. And then I had them write a script and in the script I made them be really specific: who is going act in it, what are they going to be wearing, what time of day is it going to be, where are you going to film it at, what kind of background are you going to use, are you going to add music, that kind of stuff.
So the script was really extensive which, in reflection, was probably the biggest hang-up of the whole thing because the kids got so hung-up on writing the script and the way that I wanted them to write it that a lot of groups didn't ever get past that point. I started out with 25 groups and I only had 14 groups film because the other 11 groups basically said, That's it. You're done. You're going to write a paper, because they couldn't ever get it in the script format, and I got really frustrated waiting for them to write. So I told them that they couldn't just adlib; it had to be very set out. I made them write out what they were going to say in it. And I had them do a storyboard. So they drew what they wanted it to look like, each scene. And some of those were better than others, but I think the storyboard was probably the most effective because it helped them to visualize what are the problems going to be, what kinds of props are we going to need and that kind of stuff.
Then after they did the script and the storyboard, I had them present it to the rest of the class and had the class do an evaluation, where they thought there would be problems, the things that maybe they didn't understand, whether or not they thought it would be effective. And then they redid their script and storyboards and then I evaluated it again and they maybe redid it again.
So we spent a lot of time just in the whole process of preparing to film. And then we used a digital camera from the library and some of them filmed during class, some of them filmed after class, some of the kids I'd let take the camera home at night because some of them, they filmed at night. And then after they got done filming we brought it to the library and there's only one computer in the library that has the editing software that we needed, so actually it worked out better that not all 25 groups could film because as it took a long time to edit those 14 films.
They used the software Dazzle. The software was new to the school. We were the first group to use it. And the media center person wasn't very familiar with the software and I had not sat down with the software before and so it was kind of a lot of learning as you go.
So in some ways, I think the kids kind of got frustrated with that but some of the kids really got up here, they got on it, they did it, they picked it up really quick and they were done in an hour. I had one group do their entire public service announcement all on PowerPoint. It turned out to be the best public service announcement, probably because it didn't have all the editing glitches that the other ones did. Oddly enough, it was the one that I thought was going to be kind of boring, but it turned out to be really good.
And then I had another group use the still photo option on the digital camera. What happened was they took the film the first time and they just filmed it regularly like using a video camera. We brought it to Dazzle and they couldn't get it to do what they wanted it to do; they couldn't edit it the way they needed to. So then we thought, what if you took all of these in still photos? So they went back out and in an hour shot everything they had shot in a week to meet the deadline and shot it all in still photo, edited it, and it turned out really well, too.
So they, I had a lot of kids mix video and PowerPoint slides to do the screening and I had a lot of kids add music. Probably the biggest problem with the editing portion of the project and the final product was sound. We never considered how the sound would pick up on the video camera and I had the kids come in and redub some of their sound but even that just didn't turn out quite right. And I had one group, they did theirs on genital warts and they did it with the nurse and we used a central microphone on the center of the table and it was supposed to be strong enough to pick up everybody's voices but it wasn't and so that's probably where the public service announcements didn't quite live up to their potential. Some of them were really, really hard to hear and it was hard to get the balance between the background noise if they added music and what they were saying. So if I were to do it again, I would probably try to figure out how to do the sound differently, either not record the sound the first time and just dub it in or something different because what we did didn't work as well.
Why did you choose to use that technology? The camera and the PowerPoint, why do you think that you chose to do that, what compelled you to try?
I took over senior English that semester for a teacher that quit and when she left she said you need to do some kind of research project with the kids, and I really was weary about writing a four-page research paper with seniors because they are already to be done. And I thought this would be a good opportunity to use some technology to do something that's fun and still get their research component in. Plus it gives the kids some opportunity to work with some technology on the computer because a lot of them have taken a technology class and have used PowerPoint in other classes and so this is something that they were already familiar with. I think that they enjoyed it.
What kind of learning outcomes were you planning for? How did you want them to perform? You said, only certain groups got to the end, how did you balance that?
Well, what I ultimately...my goal was that they would understand that they have the power to persuade other people or to use information that's out there to get people to change behavior or to modify a behavior or to do something different with their life. That's what I really wanted them to see was that language is powerful. You don't just take English because the Board of Education wants you to; you take it because you have the opportunity to change someone using written or oral language. So that was really my ultimate goal and I thought this would be, I mean, the kids write persuasive papers in Junior English and I thought this would be a new way of maybe showing them how they could influence people and some of them might be interested in this after high school. My frustration was with those kids who simply did not take the time to write the script. And they wanted to adlib and I felt like at that point they were missing the point. They weren't seeing that in order to influence people you really have to plan out what you wanted to say; that you really had to take into consideration your audience and what it is that they wanted to see.
And so I just decided that If you're not willing to play by the rules to get to the end of this project, then you'll do a different project. And I had given them that from the beginning; that had been in the assignment that if you choose not to take this assignment seriously or if you choose not to meet the deadline then you would be assigned a five-page research paper. And I changed the actual assignment that I gave them. I had them do a two-page research paper and then I had them do a two-page persuasive paper so that they still had the opportunity to do the persuasive aspect that I was looking for.
So how did you assess the PSA's then?
I graded all of the pieces. And then at the end I put all of the public service announcements on one videotape and I graded them on three components. One was the information, like is it believable? Because some of the facts that the kids got were just way out there and I thought, Where did you get this? It just really didn't seem to fit. Did your information, if you had more than one quote, was it all related? I tried to teach them that you can't just put three quotes on a screen. What did they have to do with each other? And what do they have to do with your audience? Why is your audience going to care about this? And then I graded them on the aspect of is this realistic for the audience. Is it realistic to expect them to be persuaded by what you're telling them? For instance, I picked their audience; I gave them two audience options. One was teenagers and one was the parents of teenagers. And they said that their audience was teenagers and they were doing a public service announcement about smoking marijuana or doing cocaine and all of their consequences or reasons for not doing it had to do with health effects; I said that's not very persuasive to a seventeen-year-old who thinks that they're going to live forever.
So I tried to get them to see that when you're targeting an audience you have to think about what's going to move them. Are financial consequences going to move them? Are consequences related to being in jail? Or getting arrested or having certain something on your record? Are those things going to affect them more than health effects? And I don't think that having a hole in your brain, most teenagers aren't going to see that as something obvious that's going to happen to them. They're going to think, not me.
So that was the second part. And then the third part of the grade had to do with the editing aspect and I actually accounted very little of the grade...the public service announcement was worth 100 points...and I think only 20 points of that 100 were related to the editing aspect and basically I looked at their sound quality and I tried to be fairly reasonable with that considering that we, all of us, had not taken into consideration that aspect. If they had to cut their film did it flow nicely and most of the kids did a really nice job with that. Did, in terms of their filming, was it paced well or were there parts where it was just really dead and they could have edited out that part or started something sooner. And I told them they had to meet the 30-second to 1-minute guideline because I had told them at the beginning that I'd like to show them on the school cable channel and so I wanted them to meet a commercial. And so I timed them to make sure they fit in the 30-second to 1-minute slot.
What was your role exactly in the use of the technology?
Actually I did a lot of coordinating to make sure that kids got the camera. I filmed for a couple of groups. But they came up to the library. I would send a group by themselves. We filmed for a whole week and so I kind of staggered and tried to get people to film all at once so that they could go to the library the next day. And then we just kind of staggered it and I would send some of them up here and they would work all hour with the librarian and she...They had to figure a lot of it out by themselves. She showed them where the help button was in the Dazzle program and then I had a student aide third hour who's very technologically savvy. And she editing, she's also in my second hour, she had already edited her entire film and so I sent her up here third hour to help kids learn how to use the program because then I could still be with my class third hour. But she really likes using the computer so it was good for her to be able to be up here and to help people. Some of my other kids who figured the program out fairly quick are up here during the day in the library so some of them kind of helped out. And then at the very end the only thing that I really did was go through and dub everything that was on the computer onto the videotape. And I helped on and off after school or during my lunch hour; I'd help kids edit if they needed it. For the most part, they did it all themselves. So I know kids spent like a whole week up here editing but they really took it seriously.
Then how successful do you think this was? It sounds pretty successful, why do you think it was?
One reason I think it was successful was because I threatened to show them on TV and they didn't want to be embarrassed. The project became more successful once they started filming, once they saw it on the computer, once they saw what they had done and what they could do with it. Suddenly they became very interested in refilming and getting things exactly right and that point in the project I was exhausted and I just wanted the project to be done. But I think it really was successful because once they saw it on film and once they began to see what other people were doing they really began to realize how effective they could be and the kids who didn't end up getting to film said, I had them do a project evaluation at the very end, and all the kids said it was one of their favorite things they had done this semester and the kids who didn't get to film said they wished they had gotten to film because they wanted to see what their project would have looked like on TV.
Besides the sound issue, what other lessons did you learn from this?
I need to find a different way to handle the research aspect. I really kind of gave them, for the first time in my teaching career when I taught research, I really gave them free reign to use whatever resources were available. And I think that next year, I want them to use books and magazines as opposed to the Internet because they just got so much junk off the Internet and it was hard for me to trace it and so I think next year I am going to alter the research component. I'm also going to alter the script so that it's not as taxing on them but also finding, I think since I have what the kids have done this year, I'm going to use that next year as a way of saying, These are the things that you want to think about when you're writing your script. You want to start taking all these different things into consideration. And I assumed that they would think of some of that on their own and some of the groups did and some of the groups that kind of got hung up didn't. And I think also I would, some of the topics were kind of iffy, not in appropriateness but just in the ability to find information; they were almost too specific and the kids had a really hard time with that. So I think next year I'll choose broader topics. Like one of the topics was binge drinking and the kids had a really hard time. And they had a really hard time saying, Don't binge drink because they do it and they didn't want to come out and say that. But I think it was good for them to research the issues. I think they learned a lot.
How long did the whole process take? The whole project?
It probably took four and a half, five weeks. So that's the other thing, next year I'm going to do it third quarter and I'm going to do it over a whole quarter and I'm going to assign it on the very first day of the semester and then I'm going to say, OK, the first week you have to have this much done. Second week you have to have this much done. Third week you have to have your script done, fourth week your storyboard and then the last so many weeks are going to be devoted to filming and editing so that they have all that time if they need to refilm. So I'd really like to devote five weeks to filming and editing which would give them time to get with their group, get in after school, that kind of stuff. And that way if I gave them one day a week to work on it, or two days a week half of class to work on it, that way we weren't constantly working on it all the time, because I think they got burned out on parts of it, too. They just got really frustrated.
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