Using OneNote in Media Production

I co-teach a couple Media Production classes.  These classes are offered to middle school and high school and are a semester long.  This time frame seems to be a good length of time to teach the basics of video and sound production and give students a rudimentary skill set needed for recreational and (maybe) professional and volunteer media production.

But what happens when a group of students takes the class for a second semester?

We have that problem this semester, as our five high school students are last semester's four plus a friend.  These students have the skills they need to create great videos, but they need practice to improve those skills.

Our Development Department wants videos made for our upcoming Servathon.  Our Admissions Department wants videos made for our upcoming Open House. We anticipate more video requests as the semester rolls on. These videos need to be professional and serious, unlike videos they may have produced in the past.  This requires a different focus than we had the first semester.

Two days into the new semester, we set up a faux business model, calling our students employees and we are the supervisors. But we wanted a digital tool to tie it all together.

Enter OneNote Class Notebook.

We have five students all working on completely different projects, filming, editing, teaching, and learning.  It's easy for someone to lose track of what he is supposed to do each day.  Likewise, it's not hard for the over-achiever to get slammed with work while the YouTube wonder sits back and watches videos for four days straight.  OneNote removes that problem.  Every Monday we will start class with a staff meeting, assigning jobs for each day of the week and posting them in OneNote.  This is especially helpful on those days when one of the co-teachers can't make it to class.  We can all access the same information in the same place.

We have places set up for storyboards to reside and places for the guys to take notes about the mistakes they made and the ideas they have for future projects.  We have collaborative space where great ideas can bloom and individual work spaces where students can jot their private ideas.

Creative team meetings can happen on our Aquos touch screen, with storyboarding drawn directly into the notebook. At the same time, students can type daily updates so "supervisors" and "employees" can have a running journal of how a project was put together.

We even have a page for "employee reviews" (aka rubric) so students know exactly what is expected of them.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this semester turns out as we use this great teaching tool to guide our video productions.