Recently in Project Ideas Category

My students came up with a new show concept-- and we are really pleased with the results thus far.  When asked what kinds of shows can we create that would be of broad interest, the students responded with a variety of ideas.  Since the swine flu is a hot topic now, we decided to focus on health related shows.  Thus a new show was born-- the "Healthy Living Show".

Here is an example:

We even experimented with using Google Docs in a collaborative way, so all students shared a document and brainstormed ideas, and then reserved their topic so all could see (and to prevent duplicate project topics).  We really like what Google Apps for education offers, so watch for more coming this school year as we dive into using Google apps.

Watch our Healthy Living Show projects HERE in our video showcase section of AmherstTechTV.org

This year we wanted to do something a bit different for our 10 minute "speech" to the parents attending the annual Open House Night at our school.  So using Adobe Visual Communicator, we decided to create a "video tour" of the units we teach in Technology Education at Amherst Middle School.

Sure we could have pre-recorded these segments, and had the benefit of starting over if we flubbed our lines, but hey what fun would that be?  We decided to perform LIVE so parents could see Visual Communicator in all it's simplicity.

Below is the 5th and final performance we recorded, and our performances became better each time we did them.  Suffice to say, this will now be an annual event for us as it went over extrememly well and was highly effective showing what we teach in our classrooms.

Production Note-- nearly all of what you see was created exclusively with Visual Communicator, except for the classroom footage which we used our handy Flip Video cameras for, worked great!

Submitted Question:

Hi I teach Spanish with web cam. I live in Germany and my students live in Eagan Minnesota, I teach all the classes with a live camera, I want to know if I can use The School TV Made Easy equipment in my class?

I'd say yes, as long as you are doing a "one-way" live broadcast.  You could use Visual Communicator's live stream capabilities, or even the SchoolTube streaming capability.  We will be doing this soon with our "Live @ 9:05" Newscasts from our school, so I will feature more blog articles when we have the knowledge of how to best accomplish this.

In any case, the Getting Started Package will allow you to use any classroom or office as a greenscreen TV studio, for both live or prerecorded projects like we do at my school.

Hope that helps, leave questions or comments below.