Video announcements is something that almost everyone at Tahoma high school has seen at some point, and love it or hate it there is a lot that goes into it.
Unless you are a part of video announcement you probably don’t know what it is like, so let’s look at it and take a deep dive into the creation of announcement.
“The main goal of the announcements,” according to Mark the assistant of Mr. Haag, ”is to inform students about what is going on” while also supporting what he calls climate and culture and entertaining the students.
Mr. Haag said that, “announcements is our vehicle to teach skills and to improve those skills, that is the main class goal” while still working to try and support climate and culture.
He also went on to say that another “goal is to help people find things and people that they are interested in.”
But how long does it take to make announcements as it’s not a simple task? Mark said that, “4 weeks before their announcements are due. they know when all are due before hand… due the Friday before they air.”
Haag also said around 4-6 weeks and then also went into what an average process looks like. “Week 1 is for ideas, weeks 2 and 3 are for the side stories, interviews, and B-roll. week 4 is the final last-minute stuff such as anchors and events and whole team pieces also bringing it all together.” He also said that they could have it be 6 weeks, but the time pushes people to stay focused.
Both Haag and Mark can agree that announcements are going well this year, but both also brought up the main problem with this being a high school class, kids leaving.
Mark brought up that older students can teach newer kids but as the older move out there are growing pains for newer students. “Some things don’t go perfectly but that helps them grow.”
Haag had a lot to say on the topic. He started by saying that, “in the professional environment you can train employees for 2,3,4,5,6,10,20 years,” but in high school you could only have 2 to 4 years.
Starting over every year with new students, “always this rotation,” and describing it as the “nature of the beast,” which does make sense when you look at it, and while Haag does want students to go and grow their skills, he does see that there is only so much he can do.
But where can things be improved? Haag said that each group has a “unique goal to improve climate and culture,” before going on to say that they must have a solid cohesive team which is where he wants to improve things. Learning how to build a team that can work well together and doesn’t want to let their team down.
Mark went down a little bit of a different route as his main goal was to improve “the student body engagement when in video announcements,” stating that, “they could embrace it a bit more” and saying that the other students should “show out for their school” to show the uniqueness of our students, and this is but a small taste.
It is interesting to see what goes into the creation of these videos. It will be interesting to see where these will go and if some of the growth Haag and Mark are looking for will happen. I look forward to seeing what will happen next.
