Lessons Learned

I think I will make a short video one day about parents attending their children’s school performances. The opening scene will be parents poised with camcorders and cameras at their sides. The music plays softly as the camera turns towards children preparing to play their instruments, act their parts, share their products, etc. Then in one swift movement, the hardware moves upwards and quickly covers the faces of the parents. I include myself in this group as on many occasions I have had a camcorder in one hand and a camera in another.

We as parents often end up with poorly recorded video or images that are not close up enough to really show the child. As we usually recorded concerts, plays, etc. at my last school, we were able to connect the video camera into the sound system for excellent audio quality support by video professionally shot. The recorded video was burned to DVD and given to the teachers for their personal copy of the various performances. We did not make copies for a larger audience. I did start thinking about what a service it would be to give or possibly sell these DVDs to parents for their enjoyment in the future and to give them more time at student presentations to really be there with their children as opposed to trying to document it with their cameras.

Our music teachers began to request that I come to their dress rehearsals to get close up photos of their students in action. I would then post the images to our school gallery site for easy download by parents. This turned out to be an easy way to support the community with minimum effort.

One of my concerns in using technology is what I call the “fluff factor”. We see it sometimes in the classroom when students spend hours on Kidpix style creations or videos are made for Parent Night aimed to entertain parents as opposed to share student learning. Thus, I swayed back and forth a bit about putting in hours to record and edit videos for the sake of “keeping the parents happy” which comes up from time to time in much of what directs our efforts in schools. There is clearly a difference in videotaping a student sharing her learning and supporting that effort as opposed to supporting the misuse of technology when we use it to allow the fluff factor to take up valuable student learning time during the school day.

Our AV specialist at my last school was one very busy person so it definitely was not worth all the time it would take him to produce videos of performances unless we could figure a way to tie that time back into student learning. It would take away from his effort to support real learning in the classrooms. The same goes for my time in editing the video.

At my new school they have been recording not just student performances but PD presentations, guest speakers, etc. as a way to document and then share learning opportunities. I, in fact, recently watched a classroom presentation by an MIT professor on genetics that is a part of the archive saved by the school AV specialist Glenn Wolfe. These recordings of student performances are then put up for sale directly to parents. The way Glenn brings the effort back to student learning is to take the profits from the sales to then buy video and audio hardware that goes directly into the hands of the students for their learning.

I think Glenn has come up with a reasonable solution for supporting the community giving parents professionally created recordings while supporting learning by using the profits to purchase equipment. The line still needs to be drawn on what is worthwhile to be recorded. This can put the IT professional in a difficult position especially when the “but parents love it” argument is used when one is being asked to videotape students for parental entertainment purposes (learning is not being shared) or possibly for misguided assessment efforts where time is wasted recording something that doesn’t have an audience or purpose. I still have a cautious attitude if the recording and editing is a constant effort by school personnel. Maybe one answer is to hire an out of school production company to do the work to cover the main performances. Balance is the key.