The Sunrise Story

Today is an exciting day. After school, I am sharing a presentation with the staff at my school. They have five or six choices and I'm offering one of them. The exciting part is this...my co-presenters. I am presenting with seven of my seventh-grade students.  A couple of weeks ago, a colleague of mine, the brilliant Mrs. Jenny Miller,  came into my communications classes to teach the students skills that will help them become skilled interviewers and presenters. The kids loved it. I saw their eyes light up. They came alive!  It turned out that I had been invited to present today. It seemed like a quick turn-around, but I asked for volunteers. In one class, eight students asked to do this with me. We met and they brainstormed ideas. They created the promo video to get the audience to pick our presentation! I showed them how I plan out my presentations and they watched carefully. We decided on the message and the things we wanted the participants to do during...

This blog post has been requested by my seventh-graders. "Ms. Haseltine, a lot of people follow you on Twitter, right? A lot of people read your blog? Will you write about us?" How could I say no to that?!?! One of the classes I teach is an elective, Communications, and this year our class has created an original news show for our morning announcements.  Our first show. I confess that I had no idea where to begin, so our amazingly creative IFT (Instructional Facilitator for Technology) joined us and helped us find a beginning. We jumped in on December 4th and we haven't looked back since! Students pick their assignments and create new and interesting news segments. They take their phones and find places around the building and then they film themselves. Each day there's a producer who takes all of the segments and edits them together. What they create...I can't believe it! It's all done by the students. Filmed, edited, produced...all by s...

Morning Announcements. The communications classes I'm teaching have taken over the morning announcements or the news, as we call it.  I have a confession about this...I was nervous about it and kind of dreading it. I had no experience and no idea what to do or how to make it good. I'm so glad that I stuck with it because it's amazing! How did we begin? We watched the news and talked about previous experiences with announcements and recording ourselves. We used FlipGrid almost every single class to get used to being on camera. We spent hours observing and rehearsing until the day we did it for real. Communications is the last block of the day, so we record the news the day before and push it out to the classrooms the next morning. Students work in pairs or groups of threes. They get their assignment, their press pass, and they have a limited amount of time to record their segments. They search the building for the very best place to record.  It's been two w...