One day, I will make a short video 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 videos or images that need to be closer to show the child. As we usually recorded concerts, plays, etc., at my last school, we connected the video camera to 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 copy of the various performances. We did not make copies for a larger audience. I started thinking about what a service it would be to give or sell these DVDs to parents for their enjoyment in the future and to give them more time at student presentations to be there with their children instead of 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 was an easy way to support the community with minimum effort.
One of my concerns in using technology is the “fluff factor.” We see it sometimes in the classroom when students spend hours on Kidpix-style creations or videos made for Parent Night to entertain parents instead of sharing student learning. Thus, I swayed back and forth about working hours to record and edit videos for “keeping the parents happy,” which comes up from time to time in much of what directs our school efforts. There is a difference between videotaping a student sharing her learning and supporting that effort instead of 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 very busy, so it was only worth some of 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 authentic classroom learning. The same goes for my time editing the video.
At my new school, they have been recording not just student performances but PD presentations, guest speakers, etc., to document and 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. Glenn brings the effort back to student learning by taking the profits from the sales to buy video and audio hardware that goes directly into the hands of the students for their learning.
Glenn has devised a reasonable solution for supporting the community by 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 am still cautious if the recording and editing are a constant effort by school personnel. One answer is to hire an out-of-school production company to do the work to cover the main performances. Balance is the key.