 How does your school community and the greater public hear about the great things happening in your school? Newsletters? Local media coverage? A loudspeaker? I'm Brad Wilson. As a teacher, I took every opportunity to put digital media tools in my students' hands because I saw the benefit of having kids engaged while reflecting, sharing, and celebrating learning. The adventure of starting a student news team showed me that kids of all ages should be empowered to use their voices to tell the story of their school. The concept is simple yet powerful. With the guidance of dedicated adults and a few basic technology tools, a group of young people can reach a wide audience with student-driven content while gaining valuable experiences along the way. Let's meet some of the students and the educators who support them who have overcome small budgets and limited time to create sustainable programs with creativity and 21st century skills at their core. In three, two, one. Welcome to the 2012 K-12 online conference, Student Voices Strand. What does it take to start a student news team? What can a student news team do for your school? Why would kids want to be on a student news team? Today is Monday afternoon first. I'm Cassidy Curtis. Long time no see. Miranda Hain bringing you the morning announcement. Our media class has been an integral part of school relations, communication for Michigan Center. Not only important for our daily announcements, we're able to address character needs as well, whether we have an issue with texting or bullying or if we want to connect with an important cause. Everything channels through our media class. They really took off with it and the kids loved seeing it in the school. The kids loved seeing themselves on tape. The students loved it. The teachers loved it. We started with basically nothing and Mr. View and our students have moved us into a lot with little. And it is possible to make that happen as long as you have the support and you have someone that really has the drive and motivation to make it happen. There was really no start-up cost for us. It was great and the principal loved it so much that she said, well we can get you a computer maybe next year and maybe we can get you some editing software. So after that it cost about 500 bucks to get the whole thing started to kind of where it is morphed into today. The hardest thing in this class actually because you have to pick a topic and it has to be a topic that no one else has done. So that's really hard in itself but then you have to go research it, find all the information that you need and that you want. Put all that information to a script and you have to interview people, put out surveys, all that kind of stuff. Then you have to put it all together into one big thing that everyone is going to seek. My name is Colin. I'm 15 years old and I'm from the little town of Michigan Center. The big stories take a lot of time. I have already done one and it takes, first you have to research and then once you get your research you usually have to think of a good way to present it on the camera and it takes a lot of thinking and a lot of work. Mine I did, I did texting and driving with a partner and I feel like I was able to reach out to the whole school and tell them why texting and driving is a bad thing and that they will take it and take it into their car and do the right thing. It's really something to be proud of. The kids take ownership of it. They write their own stories. They choose the direction of which the way this class goes so they are doing everything. I don't edit. My editors do all the editing. They put the pictures in for their larger stories. They do everything in this class which is really the way teaching is supposed to occur. I'm just kind of a bystander, a silent partner if you will. If there's something going wrong then I step in and I'll talk to them about it or tell them how they can improve their work in front of a work behind the camera but they do all the work. So it's awesome. They get a lot of benefits from it. Media class because I've been a stage actor since I was 7 years old and I just wanted to get some experience in front of the camera. I've always had an interest in journalism but I've also liked being in the camera and helping behind the scenes and this class gave me all the opportunities to actually do those things. We use a lot of cameras. We have three main cameras that we use and then we have a camera for pictures and we basically use the cameras to record and also to do voice-overs and we also have two laptops and an iPad that we use for editing and research. Where you can go on to our website and there's a link right on the homepage that says Michigan Center Announcements. You can check that and there's a list of other videos right there. When I wondered about students who had already gone through the program, Mr. View told me I needed to meet Mason. Hi my name is Mason Flick and I am currently a junior at Central Michigan University. Back in high school I was one of the first students to get involved with the media class at Michigan Center High Schools and the really cool thing about the morning announcements was it was an everyday thing. Everybody got to get involved and everybody got to be creative and that's what I loved. I absolutely loved being able to be myself in front of the camera and let out that creative side of me that I couldn't let out in any other of the classes in high school and that's why I decided to pursue broadcasting outside of high school. So right now I attend Central Michigan University where I am involved with a number of co-curricular programs not to mention New Central 34, the student run station there at CMU, the athletic department shooting sports and all the other more hall television shows that I've been involved with both in front of and behind the scenes. So it's been a great experience. First of all today I'm from high school. And I'm Collin Soltis. And remember, stay classy. Now let's head over to Battle Creek Michigan where a small news program is a source of great pride. The idea of my Mary Phillips who is my technology teacher my wanting to pull myself out of it and have it be something that was student directed trying to figure out how to do that in a way to include our technology piece in there and the help the students who are interested in tech and media writing and producing have them participate in the program. So that's how it came about. She said whoever wants to join the WDOI they could join it. So me and Ronnie Lopez, we are after class we went and got some paper and we signed it out and we signed up. It's a little too much for us. To me it looked fine. It really looked fine. It was a broadcast on one of those schools. Being a student driven is a benefit because they really want to do it. And so when you attach the responsibility piece to the news they come to school on time, they study their lines they make sure they learn how to operate the equipment appropriately so that they don't damage it. So it's a morale booster for a lot of kids and it's also a self-esteem booster. We have children who in the past have been afraid to maybe speak up or to speak out in front of others and we have children who don't normally do that volunteering and asking to do the news. So I think that that's helped also. How does it feel to broadcast in front of those school schools? Fine. Good. I'm scared. I think that brings the school community together better. And also when children are broadcasting the news students I think better understand and are able to connect with what a child is telling them will be happening in their school or what expectations are. So I think it makes it more kid-friendly for all the students in the building. We'll probably use the iPad after school. We have a night of flight. So there will probably be people who come and ask us questions or something. There will be somebody who has taken notes with the iPad or something. So some of the teachers would have come in and then they would give us notes. Yes. Miss Rosso, she comes in and she would write it down and say she would first ask us, they would first ask us are we doing the news today and then they would ask us can we like you announce this? Yes, announcements about like whatever they're asking us for and then we would do that as other news. So what about if you saw something that you think should be in the news or one of your classmates saw something, could you suggest it so that it gets on the news? Yeah, like no bullying. Where did you get the idea for no bullying? We saw something when we were walking that were bullying somebody or getting bullied. A great way to find inspiration for your programs is to visit the dynamic online community on SchoolTube. You'll find news teams from all grade levels and plenty of other digital storytelling examples. Our students use this platform to share locally but to also reach a global audience of their peers. They love checking to see how many views each episode had gotten and were thrilled that their stories had reached thousands. Sharing is by nature at the heart of a news team and it can easily be facilitated on today's web. Consider the benefits of starting a Twitter feed or Facebook page for your program. We've found that this is how hundreds of parents were connecting with their episodes and leaving the students feedback. The next group of student voices I want you to hear come from 10th, Colorado and I know you'll be amazed at how far their team has come. I'm Grady and I'm in fifth grade. I'm a producer here at K-pop Studios so I'm going to show you a little bit about what I do every morning. So every morning when I come in I have to get the TV on. I have to get my audio blue on which is the way that we produce or publish our shows. Also I make sure everything is running on this sound board here and when it comes time for show I just make sure everything is running smooth. I've been working in the studios in second grade when studio was just two computers and a microphone. But it's really been a great experience it's something that I really want to do and I'm happy to come every morning to be part of it. So sometimes when people see our studio they're like oh well you know we could never do that but in reality we started off just like Grady was saying we borrowed a computer for somewhere else in the school because there was not a computer for a studio here and we had Audacity on it which was a free audio editing program and we plugged in, the first ones we plugged in were $8 microphones that we got at Walmart and so we plugged them in and then put a splitter and then we put them in the microphone jack on the front of the computer and those first couple of years were rough I mean we were still trying to get how the flow of K-Bob would work and all those different things and then we kept going back to the community and doing a little bit of fundraising saying we've now done a hundred episodes we really like doing this could we have a mic stand or could we have studio mics and over the last couple of years that's how it's kind of built I think a lot of people need to understand that you start small like even with just basic flip cameras or anything you can put together and then as the students progress I think the money will be there eventually that you'll be able to take it to wherever your dreams want to go I'm Nicholas, third grade My job in K-Bob is sound tech I get the music started make sure it's running behind the TV I get this with like any reason it goes through anything it goes through all the TVs That's something new we're trying out for this year it's still in its data we're trying to figure it out how it's all going to flow and that's another thing that I constantly with the students I'm getting inspired I throw something at them and then they do it they put their age-appropriate kind of skin to it and then we're like well they can really do that kind of things and then we can build upon their talents and their skills to do other different things and that's where the web shows kind of going but if you want to find out what happens next you'll have to read the book that sounds like a great book well that's it for this week's check out this new book in the library back to you fifth grade thanks fourth grade we'll let's keep moving on by showing you our fifth grade section of the web show called tell me a tall tale anybody who knows about the school or has a kid who won or has a kid that's going to go to kindergarten or any grade level they check out the website and they find it they can check that out too there's over 6,000 subscribers and so it's all those subscribers not just the subscribers but many more people that just don't subscribe but they just watch it just listen to it today we saw students engage in their school community taking ownership over meaningful tech-infused projects that helped to tell the story of a learning culture behind the scenes were motivated teachers from a wide variety of schools who took limited resources and created a vision for what is possible