Dawson Middle School Students Receive Honorable Mention for Their C-SPAN Video Project
The Alexander Dawson School is proud to announce that students Kayla Salehian, Autumn Coulthard and Elaina Young earned an honorable mention for their entry in C-SPAN’s StudentCam video competition. Their video on the US government’s Affordable Care Act was part of a collaborative effort between the eighth-grade social studies and English classes. Dawson eighth-grade history teacher, Neil Ellis, and eighth-grade English teacher, Jolie Lindley, collaborated for two weeks to produce student-made documentaries for the StudentCam competition. The national competition encourages students to think critically about issues that affect our communities and nation. This year’s theme – The Three Branches and You – asked students to tell a visual story that demonstrates how a policy, law, or action by either the executive, legislative, or judicial branch has affected them or their community and peer group.
Dawson students worked in Mr. Ellis’s social studies classes to learn about federal regulations and policies, and to understand how changes at the federal level have a direct impact locally. Students then worked in Ms. Lindley’s English classes to understand how to script a story in documentary form, create visual and textual storyboards, and script outlines for their 5-7 minute documentaries. Each completed documentary had to reflect C-SPAN’s philosophy to show varying sides of a specific issue, as well as contain supporting C-SPAN footage.
“Through the StudentCam project, Dawson students have had the chance to deeply research a government policy and learn more about how federal policy affects them,” said Ms. Lindley. “They also learned how to script a visual storyline, writing a coherent script for broadcast. In many cases, they learned how to approach experts in the community for interviews related to their topics. Finally, they used Dawson’s current technology to record audio and video and put them together into a complete movie.”
Congratulations to Kayla, Autumn and Elaina!
The C-SPAN competition is open nationwide to middle and high school students. To learn more about the StudentCam competition, visit http://www.studentcam.org/.